GROWTH might be anaemic and jobs hard to come by but you wouldn’t know it from the roaring sales of South African wine. Last year, local wine sales broke the sales record set in 2012 by a whopping 26%, producing 525.7-million litres of the nectar.

You don’t have to look too far to find the reason: the rand’s 19% fall against the dollar meant that it had suddenly become much cheaper for overseas buyers in the US, China and Russia to buy top-notch South African wine. Exports to the US alone grew 37% last year.

But it also taps into a growing global demand for wine, which is now being touted as a fashionable sign of sophistication among the increasingly affluent groups in non-Western markets, such as China, elsewhere in Asia and Russia.

Strip out the dollar impact, however, and you’ll still see strong demand for wine — partly because of a global shortage as vineyards struggled to keep up with rising demand. In 2012, in fact, the wine industry saw its biggest shortfall in more than 40 years as demand for wine outstripped supply by 300-million cases, about a tenth of total wine consumption worldwide.