A wine glass with an imprinted logo of the famous painted Soweto power station was handed to me at the door of the Standard Bank Soweto Wine Festival on the weekend.
As I walked into the hall, I found that there were a lot of people like me, people who didn’t’ know much about wine and wanted to learn.
”The first thing you need to know about wine are the different cultivars,” said a wine consultant at the Zandvliet wine stand.
My next question was going to be ”What is a cultivar?”, but the consultant was aware of my zero-percent knowledge of wine, so she explained before I could even ask.
This wine-drinking lifestyle is one that many Sowetans are unfamiliar with and it was interesting to know that someone thinks that we are fit for that lifestyle.
The Standard Bank Soweto Wine Festival ran over two evenings, on September 7 and 8. More than 4 000 people attended at the main Arena Hall of the University of Johannesburg, Soweto campus.
When I got to the festival, I couldn’t decide where to start.
With more than 800 wines and 90 brands on show, all waiting to be discovered by a new Sowetan wine drinker, it will come as a shock when I say most of the wines I tasted were all pretty much the same, from shiraz to chardonnay.
”Shiraz is by far the most popular wine here at the festival, so I can safely say that it’s popular to the Soweto market,” said Zwelibanzi Tshabalala, a wine consultant from Makro.
Tshabalala also gave some interesting pointers on the influences of taste in wine.
”You find wooded and un-wooded wine, depending on where the wine was kept during its fermentation. If the wine is kept in a wooded barrel, it then develops a woody taste; the other kind is the wine that is kept in metal tanks,” he said.
This, however, made only theoretical sense to me because all the red wines had the same bitter taste, but the scents of the flavours in the wines were easier to distinguish. I could spot the Musk flavour in the Zantsi Africa natural sweet white wine.
Interest
The first black wine maker, Ntsiki Biyela of Stellekaya wines, which specialises in red wine, told the Mail & Guardian Online on Friday that the idea of taking the culture of wine into Soweto is one that will benefit other townships.
”I know that it is ironic that South African wine makers are based in Cape Town and it would make sense to start looking for a ‘black market’ in the Cape’s townships, but the thing is that Sowetans are trendsetters. If a trend starts in Soweto, other townships in the country are bound to follow that trend,” she said.
The other founder of the festival, Lyn Woodward, said that the festival makes a lot of business sense.
”The festival will create a lot of interest amongst young people in a sense that we are not only getting them to drink wine, but we also want to educate them about it,” said Woodward, adding that South Africa has a large demand for black wine makers and the festival is a way of inspiring potentials.
An hour and a half into the tasting, most wine stands had run out of rosé and other ranges of the sweeter wines.
”People seem to be comfortable with trying the sweet wine — they literally get here and ask to taste the sweet wine and that’s why I’ve run out of rosé,” said Johan De Villiers, of Spier wines.
The JC Le Roux stand proved very popular. People were clustered around this champagne stand and few of them needed a run through the different kinds on offer because they know the JCs so well.
One of the people at the stand light-heartedly admitted that he doubted ”that anyone wants to listen to what different kinds of JC Le Roux there are; we all know them [and] we are just here to get drunk”.
The rather disappointing factor about the event was the music. I must admit that I was promised that there would not be any classical music because there was to be a move to include a more ”Soweto-feel” in this regard, but this was not to be.
One of the ‘Four Cousins’, Neil Retief, said that the festival was exciting for him because Four Cousins is a well-known wine brand. Retief told the M&G Online on Saturday that the Four Cousins Wines range has always been popular in Soweto.
”Our wines are entry level wines and they are for easy drinking, and that is why they are so popular. They were made for the ‘beginner’ and the Sowetan market is only just discovering the wine culture,” he said.
I had resigned myself to the idea of leaving the festival in a not-so-sober state, but I learned that tasting does not necessarily mean drinking. The instructions of wine tasting are as follows: After pouring, ‘swirl, smell, taste and spit’, and when the instructions are followed thoroughly, there is no way you can get drunk, even if you insist on testing all 900 wines.
The wine festival was running for the third time this year and the organisers were happy with the response.
”The aim of the festival is to get Soweto ‘wine-wise’, and so far we are winning because I am not the only wine trader in Soweto — local bottle stores have wine as well and the culture is growing,” said Mnikelo Mangciphu, a founder of the festival and owner of the Morara Wine Emporium in Mofolo, Soweto.