Soweto’s spacious Ubuntu Kraal will be abuzz with ”cheeky noses” and ”extraordinary finishes” when Soweto’s first wine festival runs from Friday to Sunday.
As part of the South African Wine Industry Trust’s (Sawit) drive to promote wine locally, the festival will be an ”elegant introduction to the juice of the Earth”, Sawit chairperson Gavin Pieterse said at a media launch on Monday.
It will also be an attempt to draw new local wine drinkers and introduce newcomers to South Africa’s R16-billion to R18-billion wine-production industry, which has had to find ways of filling the export profit gaps presented by a strong rand.
A highlight among the 500 wines on offer from 86 producers will be wines by 10 of South Africa’s black economic empowerment farms, including Black Grape, Blouvlei Wines, Loopspruit and Eden’s Vineyards.
”It’s the first time up to 12 different black-owned brands will be showcasing their wines in this country,” said the chairperson of the Black Vintners’ Alliance, Vukile Mafilika.
”Come and sample our wines, come and taste them,” he urged. ”But don’t come because we are black … but because they are good quality wines,” he said.
During apartheid, the sale of liquor in black communities was strictly controlled by laws that prevented black entrepreneurs from obtaining liquor licences, and severely limited where black
people could buy liquor from.
Raids on illegal drinking places, named after the Irish ”shebeen”, were common.
Racial segregation played a large part in deciding who drank where and with whom, and in many places, beer drinking was restricted to vast beer halls, the profits of which were used to fund bantu administration boards.
Workers in the wine industry were controversially paid partly in wine through the ”tot” system.
According to a Department of Trade and Industry liquor-policy paper, racially biased regulation led to the criminalising of tens of thousands of liquor traders and to a regulatory breakdown.
”Only in 1962 was it made legal for black people to purchase from white liquor outlets, and then under strict conditions,” the paper said.
Mafilika said new black wine drinkers also have to overcome individual families’ attitudes to wine drinking.
”In the black community, it is taboo to have a bottle of wine with your family,” Mafilika said. ”But this is changing. People want to have wine with supper and we see a lot of black women going into Pick ‘n Pay to pick up a bottle of wine. The market is still untapped.”
As people become more interested, they want to know more and start asking, ”Okay, who wants cabernet?” when they have friends over.
As part of efforts to break the impression that South Africa is a nation of beer drinkers, the festival will include lessons by the Cape Wine Academy on wine-tasting etiquette.
”If you go to a wine tasting and learn how to hold, and how to taste, you get comfortable,” said Mafilika, who holds a BSc in viticulture from the University of Stellenbosch.
As the wine industry transforms, more black vintners are signing up for the four-year BSc offered at the University of Stellenbosch and more black winemakers — women included — are making their mark.
The changes are reflected in the choice of names, such as Ses’ Fikile, Lindiwe and YammÃ