A SONG OF WOMEN AND WINE
They are gradually taking up leadership positions in the wine industry
ABOUT 30 years ago it was almost unheard of for women to be taking up leadership positions in the wine industry in South Africa.
But, in the past 15 years, women have thankfully been carving a path that hopefully has opened the gates for many women to become captains of the wine industry – a welcome development.
Debi van Flymen – a Cape wine master who is the founder and owner of two companies, Grape Slave and DVF Distributors, both based at Dunkeld West Shopping Centre in northern Johannesburg – is a woman who has carved out a niche path of reliable respectability and appeal within the wine industry in
South Africa.
“Grape Slave deals mainly with consumers. Somebody says: ‘I want to learn more about wine’ or ‘I like this wine’ or ‘What three or four other wines I should try? or ‘I am making this for dinner, what wine can I buy?’ Or they’ll come to a tasting and start asking wine questions and become wine curious. We try to not be snobs about anything,” says Van Flymen.
“We manage cellars for some of our clients. We have some wonderful clients who invest in wines: we spend time with them, we learn their preferences and we help stock their cellars. We help them to know what they should be drinking, what they should be saving for a year or two. It’s about relationships. We are very much in the people business. It just happens to involve wine. I am blessed in that regard,” she says.
DVF Distributors deals mainly with bigger clients such as restaurants and hotel chains. A restaurateur may approach her: “We are changing our menu, can you come help us with the wine list?”
“We do that quite regularly. We are always independent. We train sommeliers. We charge nothing to help our clients with doing a wine list, only for the wine.”
Van Flymen says no two days are ever the same in the wine industry.
“From day one I was stupid enough to start two companies. It’s been a really difficult ride.i don’t have partners, I don’t have shareholders. I have an amazing team of people around me.
It’s not easy. I sit down every morning and I make notes of what I hope to achieve during the course of the day. If you’re targeted in your approach, your chances of success, lead to a far better outcome.”
Van Flymen advises that if you operate a restaurant with a wine list, you have to look at your demographics, whether they are “budget conscious” or they “order more of less expensive things” because it is crucial to have a holistic view of your business.
“It’s also about genuine fun, the joy on people’s faces. This is what wine does. You create a connection with people. And then you want to share that,” says Van Flymen.
“There are certainly larger producers, who physically produce way more quantity than some people. You can look at the market from that perspective: the large players, the mediumsized players, the smaller players, or garagiste players who are essentially people making wine from their garages.”
The garagiste movement started in 1995 in South Africa, and is still growing.
She says of all the difficulties faced by entrepreneurs in the wine industry, the greatest is finding and retaining good staff.
“It’s one of the reasons that sometimes some restaurants are loath to invest in their staff, very specifically, in the wine trade and in the hospitality trade. Just when you have skilled somebody up, they will leave. ”
Because the wine industry is resource and water-intensive, the erstwhile Day Zero water shortages in Cape Town last year were good for the vines.
“This actually helped improve the quality of certain wines . The Cape
Town water thing was good for the quality of the wine, because vines concentrate the nutrition in the berry”. But she says it is bad news for the winery, which needs tanks of water to keep machinery clean.
But margins are tight.
“We are caught at the same time with needing to raise the average price per bottle on our wines, in order to have long-term sustainability of the industry.”
Though the wine industry in South Africa is still “male dominated,” says Van Flymen, who lived in the US for 15 years before she returned , she says the industry is changing.
“There are a host of women winemakers who are working very hard to change all of it. They all have different roles. Even in a winery, you can have a winemaker, a cellarmaster, winery assistant, assistant winemaker.”
She says two factors matter:
“Do you like what’s in your glass? Life is too short to drink wine that you don’t enjoy. Taste is memory. When you find something you like, you generally stick to it. The second question: Is it at your price point? If it’s at your price point, then enjoy what’s in that glass.”
But, “let’s face it, we are not a winedrinking country.
I am going to get probably lambasted for saying that. But, we are still a beerdrinking country. We drink beer, we drink RTDS (Ready-to-drink) and we drink whisky and other things before we drink wine.
So, when you look at the emerging opportunities, a lot of them involve the ability to try and get young upwardly mobile South Africans.
“The wine world is a world that opens people up to so much: culturally, meeting people, travelling, sharing, story-telling. It’s a journey.”