Hats off to Winelands for publishing an opinion piece in the September edition of their organ. The censor board is still active in Paarl, but the story crept through almost unsnipped. Even the title was retained. WTF! Here is the unexpurgated version for media students and the curious.

“Wyn is vir meide” was the comment of the Durbanville farm owner at Sunday lunch between the Gordon’s Gin and Bitter Lemon and before the Oudemeester. An extreme assessment of the position of wine for SA consumers. After I bought Lemoenfontein on the Paardeberg back in 2007, I attended several functions at my local Co-op in a spirit of good neighbourliness and was amazed to see the braai begin with beer and end with brandy. Some producers stuck with brandy throughout. The Co-op hit a financial brick wall shortly afterwards.

SA wine has fallen between the riempies of the stoel. Emigration of young South Africans in the nineties and noughties saw around one million potential and actual consumers of mid to high priced wine pack for Perth and trek to Toronto. While many have made the reverse journey after the global recession of 2008, the top end of SA wine is still far from robust as new immigrants from Africa aspire to anything but wine.

Many potential consumers feel alienated from wine and don’t understand all the European references: from faux-French terms invoked to complicate the subject to sneering sommeliers who make ordering a bottle in a restaurant the social equivalent of negotiating a minefield. For a product made in Africa, where are the African connections?

Cuvée this and Château that, Bordeaux blends and Méthode Cap Classique instead of Kaapse Vonkel. WTFSA? Why not a Bellville blend? After all, SA is the vineyard of Africa. No wonder wine is not aspirational for the majority of South Africans. Rating systems that award stars to a bottle or a score out of 20 or 100 further muddy the water as they neglect the feature most important to consumers: price. How to choose the most suitable bottle from a national cellar stocked with 7000? This is something our weekly RECM best value tastings at the Taj Hotel seek to remedy. Wines are tasted blind and the prices of similar quality level wines are compared to determine best value options for consumers.

Added to market confusion, strikes and local labour unrest has seen the downward spiral of SA wine prices continue in a race to the bottom while an anti-alcohol message from government and drink driving campaigns have put serious pressure on social drinking. While domestic sales show a moderate 4% growth, in value terms the increase is probably negligible or even negative. In Euros, the currency in which oak barrels are priced, surely negative and certainly down in the mid to high-end of the market, according to anecdotal evidence.

The growth and growth of discounters like Johan Wegner and his GetWine operation has effectively placed a R100 ceiling on quality red and probably half that for whites as even the larniest of brands get discounted. A further wrinkle was the unexpected strength of the Rand against the Euro a couple of years ago that saw several supermarket chains expand their selection of imported wines.

Ultra Liquors offered French Champagne at R150 a bottle while Shoprite Checkers stocked an amazing value-for-money selection called Wines of the World, punted on a national roadshow by the owner of WineX, Michael Fridjhon and celebrity chef Jenny Morris. While a recent correction of exchange rates has seen imports dry up, many cases of imported wine still have to work through the system. In addition, with several supermarket chains expanding aggressively into Africa, given the popularity of Portuguese wines in Mozambique and Angola for example, interest in SA consumers from European producers will likely continue.

So what is to be done? Should WOSA, which annually spends R35 millions (funded by an export levy) be expanded to market to the domestic market? Probably not, judging by the performance of SA exports which are now dominated by bulk exports (two out of every three exported bottles leave the bottle behind) which do not benefit from generic marketing.

Ross Sleet is marketing director at Cape Legends which is owned by Distell, custodians of some of the largest wine brands in SA like Two Oceans, Obikwa, Chateau Libertas, Graca, Fleur du Cap and Zonnebloem. Writing in Business Day in June, Ross made the point “punting mass-market, cheaper wines exclusively is not going to pay off in the long run; SA needs to extol its own brand stories.

We have a rich heritage, passionate wine makers and brand marketers, and specialist industry advocates of cultivars and types. Some farms of less than 100ha have nine soil types and seven slope aspects — we should focus on these extraordinary narratives and circumstances and let the commodities take care of themselves. Supermarkets can only gain from our enhanced stories and value offerings as this will drive up prices and profits over time. No-one seriously thinks that they are winning by over-promoting cheap and cheerful wines; they clog up valuable shelf space, and generate significantly lower margins than higher priced wines.”

So will there be a swing in marketing spend to terroir brands such as Lomond at the expense of Obikwa and Two Oceans? Or is the whole game about to change? One rumour in the Winelands is that new broom Distell CEO Richard Rushton would love to sell Cape Legends. 50% partner Hans Schreiber has long been a seller of LUSAN – five historic Stellenbosch estates with stories galore which are marketed by Cape Legends.

I asked DGB CEO Tim Hutchinson whether he was a buyer. “I have no desire to own land in Stellenbsoch” replied Tim, “but I’d take the brands in a shot.” Which confirms that Ross’s story model is not universally accepted by successful wine negociants. This is an argument with serious legs. Just like the Alto Shiraz 2011, a multi-storied wine.

Which was the overall top-scoring red at the inaugural Checkers Battle of die Berge I organized with UCT’s Jonathan Steyn at Muratie last year. Danie de Wet was chairman of judges and entries from the Helderberg and Simonsberg were assessed blind by an experienced panel of tasters, looking for the elusive golden thread of terroir.

The idea was to emphasize the tasteable differences between two leading wards in Stellenbosch and present it to SA consumers. Stellenbosch is by far the most awarded wine appellation in SA at blind tasting competitions and getting Africa’s largest retailer involved puts the terroir focus into practice.

If wines are judges sighted, then the Swartland is by far the best rated appellation as a focus on SA icons by Jancis Robinson, writing in the Weekend Financial Times in July confirmed. Brands by Donovan Rall, Chris Alheit, Adi Badenhorst, Eben Sadie and the Mullineuxs dominated the icon line-up. Brands that mostly didn’t exist a decade ago.

Luke Krone and I turned the terroir focus onto Sauvignon Blanc at Den Anker restaurant at the Waterfront when Mussels in May matched mollusks with Sauvignon from Darling and Durbanville. Sponsored by Ultra Liquors, we could have sold the event twice over. Which confirms that the great SA wine drinking pubic gets the terroir idea. But do producers?