Trampling on the vineyards
Lockdown restrictions on alcohol sales are hurting wine farms, writes Claire Keeton
Unlike millions of complaining South Africans left low and dry during the lockdown booze ban, Cathy Brewer has a cellar full of wine. Brewer is the export manager for Villiera, the biggest sparkling wine producer in the Western Cape.
One of three directors staying on the estate in Stellenbosch during lockdown — along with three winemakers and staff — Brewer buys vegetables grown by Villiera farmworkers in their own gardens.
“I will put out money and then find a sack of potatoes in front of my house,” she says.
SA’s alcohol ban as part of the coronavirus lockdown — which until Friday also applied to exports — has stoked illicit trade and the brewing of dangerous concoctions and endangered thousands of jobs. The export ban alone cost about R200m a week.
Villiera’s vineyards were deserted this week. In the cellars stood shimmering steel tanks full of wine.
“We picked our last grapes of the harvest the day before lockdown,” says Brewer.
The winemakers have been taking turns to work lonely shifts under lockdown while waiting for the ban to be lifted.
The community clinic on the estate is open when needed but the early childhood development and after-care centres are empty and silent.
Villiera exports 30% of its wine. Its popular sparkling wine has sold out in British supermarket chain Marks & Spencer. A container bound for the UK was unable to leave the harbour when the ban took effect.
Other producers were similarly affected. The ruling stopped 1,400 reserved containers, with capacity for more than 20million bottles, from leaving ports, says Rico Basson, MD of VinPro, a nonprofit company that represents 2,500 wine producers.
“If local sales remain prohibited for an extended time, 60 to 80 wineries could close down,” he says.
The massive losses come hard on the heels of a crippling drought.
At Linton Park estate in the Boland, four of the five dams still have almost no water and the sloping vineyards look dry.
Rosemary Mosia, who launched The Bridge of Hope wine range, produced in partnership with Linton Park, says: “We had wine inspected and ready to be exported. We will have to redo the certification as the original one expired.”
Ivan Meyer, MEC for agriculture in the Western Cape, says the outlook is grim. “The wine industry is in danger of losing not only immediate income but also sustaining longterm damage as a result of the prohibition on exports and domestic sales.”
Making wine is expensive. At Kleine Zalze, near Stellenbosch, cellar master Alastair Rimmer gestures in ghostly light to 500l clay containers imported from Italy, costing more than R90,000 each.
“Fortunately, we bought these before the rand fell,” he says.
But about 100,000l of wine could not be shipped to its destination due to the ban.
Kleine Zalze employs about 100 people in the winery, has vines and buys grapes from other farms. With lockdown, Rimmer says,
“our cash flow went from healthy to zero. Farmers need to be paid. Suppliers need to be paid. Workers need to be paid.”
Mosia echoes this: “Our sales stopped immediately and that affected all the people we work with.”
The vines will not wait for lockdown to end. At Linton Park on Wednesday, men and women were hard at work, fertilising the soil and laying ground cover.
As always, they started the day with a prayer, but this is conducted outdoors now rather than in the barn, and the workers maintain a safe distance from each other.
Nothing is normal, says team leader Isabelle Pietersen, who has worked at Linton Park for 18 years.
“We wear masks and wash our hands. Our temperature is taken in the mornings. We need two vehicles for transport and must sit in the marked places.”
Linton Park, Kleine Zalze and Villiera are among the wine producers that have continued to pay staff in full during the lockdown.
On Friday, the export ban was lifted, allowing producers to spring back into action with safety protocols in place.
Villiera, for example, will divide its workforce into three rotating teams to keep contact to a minimum.
Wine is SA’s second-largest agricultural export, after citrus. The hiatus in trade has made producers fearful of losing traction in foreign markets, where competition from other New World producers is fierce.
SA currently has only 1.8% of the global market share, says Meyer.
“Any interruption could be to the advantage of wines from Australia, Argentina, Chile and the US.”
The smaller the winery, the bigger the risk, but Stellenbosch winemaker Ntsiki Biyela, who produces the Aslina range named after her grandmother, is hopeful her overseas customers will still be there.
“One of our clients in the US sent me a message to say he’d bought the last case in the shop,” she says. “We had three containers waiting to go before the ban. Our volume is small but we have been growing globally.”
A client in the US sent me a message to say he’d bought the last case in the shop Ntsiki Biyela Stellenbosch winemaker