Academy for young winemakers aims to diversify South Africa's wine industry
One of the world's top 10 wine producers, South Africa owes some 9 percent of its GDP to the wine sector – but the industry remains dominated by the white minority. A training academy for young South Africans from disadvantaged backgrounds aims to change that.
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"Let me smell this one ... I think I'm smelling clove?"
Okuhle, 23, doesn't sound entirely sure as he sniffs the glass in front of him. He admits he sometimes struggles to identify the rarefied aromas of fine wine.
"I must say, it is hard to try and smell what you've never eaten. When you talk about gooseberry I'm like, 'what is gooseberry?'" he tells RFI.
"It is something that is not easy given that we're from, like, derogative backgrounds. But what they told us at the academy is that we should try more food we do not know."
Okuhle is one of around 50 students in the wine practitioner programme at the Pinotage Youth Development Academy (PYDA).
Based in the winelands of the Western Cape, the course is aimed at 18 to 25 year olds from historically disadvantaged backgrounds who haven't had the opportunity to study beyond high school.
Over one academic year they'll get a grounding in wine from grape to glass, studying production, marketing, food pairing and tour guiding.
The goal is to equip them for skilled jobs in South Africa's vast wine sector, in which, almost 30 years after the end of Apartheid, black owners and producers remain rare.
Slow progress
"You have just over 390 million litres of wine being produced within eight kilometres of this very office," Rudy Oosterwyk, the academy's head of innovation, told RFI's correspondent Claire Bargelès from the headquarters in Stellenbosch.
"Less than 1 percent of that is owned by black South Africans."
The industry has long depended on black farm workers, who for decades were exploited under the abusive dop system that saw labourers partly paid in cheap wine. The practice left a legacy of alcoholism and health problems in many of the Cape's rural communities.
While such abuses have been all but wiped out since the country's transition to full democracy in 1994, according to Oosterwyk in other respects the wine industry looks much the same.
"Over a 30-year period, nothing has changed significantly at an economic, structural level. There have been success stories, and that's great, but none of these success stories have been significant in terms of transforming the sector," he says.
By introducing a new generation to multiple aspects of the industry – from production to hospitality and tourism – the PYDA hopes to contribute to broader change.
"Our job is to make sure that we produce the best-skilled South Africans to get into the sector," says Oosterwyk. "They shouldn't get into the sector because they're black, they should get in because they're good."
Economic challenges
Through the academy, Ziyanda Njalo and her classmates partnered with a local vineyard to launch their own wine brand last year: uLutsha, named for the Xhosa word for youth.
Now a graduate, she continues to coordinate the project.
"When I started to say to people that I'm going to have our own wine brand, I think they were proud because of how the industry is so dominated by old people, white people," she says.
"Then we are black, young, we have these new ideas that we want to have."
South Africa's new winemakers aren't short of enthusiasm or talent, but finding the financing to get started in the industry is harder, explains Wendy Petersen, who until recently managed the SA Wine Industry Transformation Unit, a body that offers grants and other support for wine professionals of colour.
Such funding can be crucial in an industry that requires large sums of capital upfront and where returns are slow and uncertain.
"We've seen an influx of people coming into the industry," Petersen told RFI. Three years ago she was aware of around 60 black wine brands in South Africa; now there are 95.
But most black winemakers rely on sourcing their grapes rather than cultivating their own. According to Petersen, less than 1.5 percent of South Africa's vineyards are black-owned.
And without their own land, winemakers can't generate revenue from tourism and tastings.
Laying roots
Paul Siguqa, who owns the Klein Goederust winery in Franschhoek, is among the rare black South Africans to have bought their own domain.
It took 15 years of saving and a lot of work to revive the plot, which had lain empty for several years. The vines were in such a poor state that Siguqa replanted them entirely when he bought the land in 2021, and the first commercial harvest isn't expected until 2024.
"It's all about getting our roots in the ground," says Siguqa, whose mother used to pick grapes in the same region where he now owns 10 hectares.
"Us being here gave a lot of people hope that it's possible."
Okuhle, the PYDA student, is one of them.
"I just love it. I love everything about wine," he told RFI, explaining that he wants to go abroad to learn more and eventually establish his own brand and buy a farm.
"As I'm talking about it, I'm already dreaming about it."
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