started having a major effect on the industry: the “quota system,” which, in the name of preventing overproduction, had disallowed expansion into promising new winegrowing areas; and the guaranteed minimum price for wine, which had been part of a system that effectively encouraged production for quantity rather than quality.
It must be said that the KWV left behind it a system that manages well the bureaucratic needs of the wine industry, where control is unquestionably in the public interest. The appellation system that was introduced in the early 1970s, and its associated certification process, work efficiently under the Wine and Spirit Board, the control function contracted since 1999 to SAWIS (South African Wine Industry Information and Systems). Some of the funds wrested from the KWV went to research and generic promotion, and these are also generally well handled. And the industry flourished in the new regime of regulatory freedom, despite the lack of a continuing body to represent and strategically manage the industry. The South African Wine and Brandy Company was formed in 2002 to implement a strategic outline called Vision 2020. It lasted, without apparently achieving much, until 2006. Out of its “restructuring” emerged the South African Wine Industry Council, which was intended to deal with major wine-industry issues, from socioeconomic transformation to streamlining relations among the industry, government, and other relevant stakeholders. It, too, lasted only a few years before being abandoned. There is, at present, no pretense that any body is guiding, or even representing, the industry at the highest level.
THE WINE PRODUCERS
There’s a lot more South African wine about these days than there was in 1993—approximately half as much again. Total production (along with total vineyard area) has only increased by not much more than 20 percent, but now less of what the vineyards yield is doomed to distillation or diversion to unfermented grape juice. The 2011 vintage produced a record 831 million liters of wine, which was about 80 percent of the total wine-grape crop—the remainder going for brandy, distillation, or juice.
More important is the basic quality, and one useful indication of improvement here is the amount that is certified. In South Africa, no wine may carry any information on its label about vintage, origin, or grape variety unless it has undergone a rigorous process of certification. This involves a good deal of record-keeping and paperwork, as all stages of production are monitored to see that the basic sums add up: if so many tons of Cabernet grapes were produced on a particular farm in a particular year, producing so many liters, the authorities will get very anxious if a different volume is bottled. For a wine to be certified it must also meet a minimum level of quality, as adjudged by official tasting panels. In 1993, just 12 percent of wine was thus certified, but the proportion rose steadily each year to about 57 percent in 2011—showing a major increase in ambition.
The classic tourist image of the South African wine farm is of the whitewashed homestead and sturdy outbuildings sheltered by oaks at the foot of purple mountains, with grape pickers bearing (no doubt cheerfully) their boxes of golden or purple fruit to the crusher. But as the tourists (also hopefully cheerful) make their harvesttime way around the wine lands, they will inevitably have to wait occasionally behind slow-moving trucks piled high with grapes, and might see them turn down a side road toward what looks like a small oil refinery or industrial plant. With any luck the trucks will not have to stand too long in line there, with the sun beating down on their fragile freight, awaiting their turn to deliver the crop to the crusher. By far the larger proportion of wine, both certified and uncertified (destined for the distillery), is made at such places—unromantic, perhaps, but immensely impressive, with their miles of coiling or rigid pipes, dials and switches, hardworking attendants, and rows of gleaming and enormous stainless steel tanks, some containing a million liters of wine.
Most of these are the country’s cooperative wineries and the wineries that used to be cooperatives before converting to companies. There are still fifty-two of these “producer cellars,” as they are officially known collectively. More and more cooperatives have been commercialized since the early 1990s, largely because of the demand for higher-quality wines. Older arrangements of paying for members’ produce, with acceptance of everything guaranteed, are not feasible in today’s tougher and more exacting market. The KWV is no longer there to take, in its turn, anything unsalable by the cooperative—the national minimum price arrangement, which guaranteed an income, was finally abandoned in 1995. Now the former co-ops are generally owned, as companies, by the farmers who supply them with grapes; the latter’s income, however, now depends much more than before on such matters as grape variety and quality of fruit delivered to the crusher, because there is no longer an obligation to accept substandard or unmarketable material.
The producer cellars crush more than three-quarters of the entire wine-grape harvest—in 2011, 82 percent of the white grapes (some of which are grown specifically for brandy) and 72 percent of the red. Many of them have raised their game significantly, with increased attention to viticulture as well as to what happens in the cellar. A few of them now market single-vineyard and other prestige bottlings—more as a way of encouraging farmers to aim for quality and to build the general reputation of the winery, perhaps, than to maximize income. Generally they bottle and sell under their own label an increasing but still fairly small proportion of their own wine; the larger part is sold off to supplement the needs of private cellars or (most of it) in bulk to the wholesalers and exporters.
The wholesalers and specialist exporters—now including giants like Distell and the KWV—have a long and important history in South African wine. Before the rise of the private estates and of direct sales by the cooperatives, it was the wholesalers who were responsible for the overwhelming proportion of wines on the market, while the KWV had a virtual monopoly on exports. Wholesalers continue to market South Africa’s biggest brands locally and internationally, though they no longer have things all their own way. There are also far more of them around than there were in the ultracentralized days before the revolution of the 1990s. There were fewer than half a dozen bulk buyers in the early 1990s; now there are more than a hundred, many of which buy wines solely for export under labels that South African wine-lovers would not recognize.
Many such merchants are fairly small, of course, and none is anywhere near as large as Distell, which accounts for up to a third of all South Africa’s still and sparkling wine production. Distell was the result of a merger in 2000 of Stellenbosch Farmers’ Winery and Distillers Corporation. They had, in fact, been united for some years as Cape Wines and Distillers until 1988, when government decreed their separation; in 2000 there was no opposition from the Competition Board to the merger. And in fact the improvement in some of the well-known brands offered by Distell has paralleled the country’s general improvement, with labels like Nederburg and Fleur du Cap offering excellent quality at different levels. Distell does own some vineyards and crushes some of its own and bought-in grapes, as well as having some joint ventures with important estates; but the great majority of its wine, especially of what it produces for the middle and lower parts of the market, comes from the producing cellars. The wholesalers that crush at least some of their own grapes account for about 7 percent of the total harvest each year.
While the larger producers have increased their penetration of the fine wine market, the sort of wine that is the main concern of this book, which approaches the level of artisanal rather than industrial, comes mostly from the cellars of private producers. Their share of the total crush rose to 17 percent in 2011, but their numbers have grown even more substantially than their share of the crush, from 170 in 1993 to more than 500 by 2011. This is a total that will still seem surprisingly small, however, to someone who knows that the young wine industry of Washington state, for example, has many more wineries than this, despite a much smaller area under vine. The discrepancy is explained partly by the average price reached per bottle of wine and partly by the presence of many more wealthy people in and near Washington to buy the wine and—at a different level of wealth perhaps—to invest in wineries. It seems inevitable that the number of “lifestyle” farmers in the United States would be much greater than here—though certainly some of the new wineries and estates in the Cape have been established by wealthy outsiders willing to do what one of them, banker G.T. Ferreira of Tokara, self-deprecatingly described
