It’s not about to unseat Bordeaux or Burgundy among traditionalists – but for a new generation of wine drinkers for whom the old classics may be benchmarks rather than compulsory purchase, South African wine is definitely on a shopping list.
It is, however, not an industry free of commercial and strategic problems. We all know that most of the growers are under-recovering on their real costs. At the same time too much Cape wine is sold in bulk and at price points which continue to compromise the image of the better producers. Finally, as an industry, it is under-transformed and therefore dangerously exposed, its relationship with government too tenuous to optimise anything like its full potential.
In the midst of this there lurks the question of its future: its sustainability in the financial sense, its exposure to climate change and diminished water availability (and, of course, to competition between users of this increasingly scarce resource), the seeming absence of a guiding hand on the tiller. There are even concerns about the next generation of leadership – across the commercial entities, the producer organisations, the critics and the entrepreneurs who play a role in generating the excitement upon whose tide it moves forward so much more easily.
Some of these concerns are more easily disposed of than others. After a leadership vacuum which followed the transformation of the KWV from industry manager to simply another commercial player on the landscape, there are now new structures which are playing a valuable role at the production side of the equation. VinPro has emerged from the shadows, and under Rico Basson and his team is increasingly assuming the kind of behind-the-scenes leadership which has largely been absent since the late 1990s. The quality of their research, the data available to growers and producers, and the interface that VinPro facilitates with other key players is a measure of the capacity that is being created.
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