EPICUREAN BLENDS A PALATABLE OUTCOME
After just 20 years the label founded by Moss Ngoasheng, Mutle Mogase and Mbhazima Shilowa is ready to conquer Europe and the US
The genesis of Epicurean Wines was a chat 20 years ago between Richemont chair Johann Rupert and the founders of the brand: businessmen Moss Ngoasheng and Mutle Mogase and former Gauteng premier Mbhazima Shilowa.
The three friends would often travel and dine together but struggled to find a Bordeaux blend locally that they loved quite like the wines they discovered in France and Italy.
Well, said Rupert, if you love wine so much, why not start your own label?
So Ngoasheng (CEO of Safika Holdings), Mogase (chair of Maia Capital), Shilowa and their USbased partner Ron Gault did exactly that. Epicurean Wines, known mostly for its reds, has been using the Rupert & Rothschild wine facilities ever since. Today, two decades on, their boutique brand has established itself.
As Shilowa points out, anyone can get access to the Rupert & Rothschild facilities for a price but that doesn’t guarantee a good bottle of wine. You have to step outside, get involved in the vineyards and the cellar, “otherwise you may as well be an investor”.
As a pure investor, Shilowa tells the FM, you have no control over what happens with the wine.
“Whereas most wines are on the market in the year in which they’re produced, or at most a year or two later, we have the luxury of being able to decide when we want to put the wine in the market,” he says. “Often people say South African wines don’t age, but this is often because they’ve never had older South African wines. So if anyone goes out and looks at the Epicurean wines, you’ll find the latest vintage of red is at least six or seven years old.”
Ngoasheng, Mogase and Shilowa head down to the winery periodically (Gault is no longer involved), sit down with the winemaker and test the blends to create the final product.
not have power and complexity with elegance. And we are able to combine all of those elements at Epicurean,” he says.
Yet it’s not a brand you see on every shelf. In Joburg you’ll find Epicurean at high-end restaurants such as Marble, Saint, Modena and The Butcher Shop; in Cape Town at The Kove Collection; and in Stellenbosch at Delaire Graff and the restaurants in Bertus Basson’s stable.
This is a deliberate strategy: “We’ve been very conscious about where our brand should be and shouldn’t be,” says Mogase.
There is also a wine club, which offers preferential rates and gives members access to vintages that aren’t otherwise available.
What they’ve got out of this is a lot of pleasure, friends and conversation, says Ngoasheng, who was a political prisoner alongside Nelson Mandela for seven years. It’s not like he doesn’t have enough to do, though: apart from Safika, he is a director of Temo Capital, and is on the boards of the Investec Property Fund and the state-owned South African Special Risk Insurance Association.
So how profitable is this venture? Speak to many wine farm owners, and they’ll describe their chosen business as borderline
more of a returnon-ego for the founder than anything else.
Ngoasheng says Epicurean is “not a hungry beast that we have to feed”, while Mogase says: “The business washes its face, [and] we’re quite comfortable with that.”
Which doesn’t mean it’s not ambitious. Epicurean has held talks with a Belgian importer and hopes to land on European shelves in the next few months; and possibly be in the US by the end of the year.
Says Mogase: “The wine has almost a cult following in certain markets I’ve come across people from Europe who have had our wine and are regular customers, so it’s finding its way into some of those markets.”
For Shilowa, who was once general secretary of Cosatu and co-founded COPE, it’s been quite an adventure. He says it would be great to have Epicurean in other African markets, but the import duties are prohibitive; once this changes, the opportunity is there.
The trio evidently love their wine and sample widely.
“Winemakers talk about something called ‘cellar palate’ where anything else you drink is not good enough because it’s not your wine. So, we try to drink as broadly as possible for our own education and to see what’s going on out there,” says Mogase.
As it is, the past two decades have brought dramatic technological advances in viticulture such as using heat maps to assess the best time to pick grapes.
“It’s amazing how with wine, the techniques improve every single year with the approaches, the yeast you use, the heat treatment,” Mogase says.
Today, the business moves about 6,000 bottles of red and 2,000 bottles of white every year. Quite a harvest from a casual conversation.