A ROSÉ BY ANY OTHER NAME

Local labels you’ve never heard of, which countries drink what and who SA should be selling to. Richard Holmes does a deep dive into the export wine market

Even if you’re a committed wine collector, chances are you’ve never bought a bottle of Lesca chardonnay, or sipped on Star Tree Nouveau Rouge. Ever poured a glass of Foot of Africa shiraz, Cleefs Classic Collection chenin blanc or Helter Skelter pinot noir? Unless you’re stocking a cellar in Stockholm, Amsterdam or Shanghai, it’s unlikely you’ve even heard of them.

For these are just a handful of the wine brands, absent from local shelves, which are being poured into global markets by SA wine producers. It’s good business too, with just north of R9bn in wine exported from our shores each year.

But why rebrand, I wondered over a bottle of Cederberg shiraz recently. Where’s the value in creating another label for overseas markets? What’s wrong with the wine range sold on local shelves? Why dilute your own brand loyalty? What about costs, the ballooning stock-keeping units, and the added supply chain complexity?

The wine business seems straightforward: grow some grapes, ferment them into wine, find a buyer at the right price point, package it up, ship the wine and send the invoice. But it’s a complex category, with products ranging from vast bladders of bulk wine blended into anonymous supermarkets’ own brands to ultrapremium bespoke bottles sold for thousands of rands at a time.

Between harvesting the vineyard and the cork being popped lies a web of marketing rules, government regulations, supermarket pricepinching and plain old idiosyncratic consumers with their own ideas of what they want. Turns out, simply putting your own brand on the shelf isn’t always the best route to market.

Kleine Zalze in the Stellenbosch winelands is a cellar with no shortage of brand loyalty, and has long been respected for its awardwinning cabernet sauvignon and chenin blanc. It’s no slouch at half a dozen other cultivars too.

And yet only 60% of its production is sold under its four core Kleine Zalze brands, the rest leaving the cellar labelled Cleefs, Foot of Africa or Zalze.

The reason? Simple market forces in the key European markets.

Take the UK, for instance, where the on-trade — restaurants and bars — don’t want to be seen offering wines that are readily available on supermarket shelves. The solution?