The Cape wine industry doesn’t do a great job of celebrating its heroes. There are no “lifetime achievement awards”. The closest thing is a gong awarded annually on February 2 — the date, in 1659, when Jan van Riebeeck recorded the first crush of Cape-grown grapes.
The recipient of the 1659 Medal of Honour “should have demonstrated ... a pioneering, positive and significant contribution to the wine industry”. Laureates over the years (and there have been many deserving ones) have been almost exclusively male, white and Afrikaans-speaking. This alone should suggest that if there have been any trailblazers among them, they followed fairly well-trodden paths.
It seems exceptional individuals and great producers must wait for the international community to recognise them. In 2017, Eben Sadie won the Winemakers’ Winemaker of the Year Award, presented by the Institute of Masters of Wine. It is voted upon by all the Masters of Wine who are winemakers, as well as the award’s past winners. In 2016, Andrea Mullineux was named Winemaker of the Year by Wine Enthusiast, a US publication with a worldwide readership of 800,000. She was the first South African and only the third woman to win the award in the 17 years since its inception.
Wine Enthusiast has just announced its nominations for the 2020 awards. Three South Africans are on the list — the Radford Dale winery (New World Winery of the Year), Ntsiki Biyela of Aslina (Winemaker of the Year) and Rosa Kruger (Viticulturist of the Year). Though a nomination is not an assured place on the winner’s podium, that Wine Enthusiast has shortlisted the trio should give us pause to think about how little the Cape wine industry does to celebrate the achievements of those who don’t fit a particular, obvious stereotype.
In addition to being the source of some of the Cape’s most thoughtfully produced wines, Radford Dale, through its founder and CEO Alex Dale, played a key role in saving jobs and keeping restaurants afloat amid lockdown. Dale launched the Restaurant Rescue Project in July, just as things were easing. He donated 200 cases of his premium wines to be part of a dinner voucher initiative. This gesture spawned a much wider scheme involving about 20 restaurants and almost 30 wineries, and saved more than 800 jobs.
Biyela overcame enormous prejudice simply to enter and graduate with Stellenbosch University’s oenology and viticulture degree. After a stint at Stellekaya, she moved on to create her own brand, Aslina. The Financial Times’s Jancis Robinson confessed to being particularly impressed with her Umsasane Cabernet 2018, describing it as “nicely composed ... with no excess of alcohol or oak ... Frank, well-integrated fruit with a kick of light tannin. Really very succulent and impressive.”
Kruger has been an extraordinary force in Cape viticulture. In addition to the work she did in identifying and cataloguing the country’s heritage vineyards, effectively launching the Old Vine Project, she has almost single-handedly trained up hundreds of vineyard workers during the course of her career as a viticulturist. Not satisfied merely with passing on basic viticultural skills, she has developed structured programmes and badgered the industry’s formal organisations, most of which are more focused on celebrating 1659 than embracing the future, to assist with funding.
The Cape wine industry comprises a vast pool of talent, and its many artists are driven by any number of different motivations: fame, celebrity status, curiosity, the challenge that comes from plunging into the heart of a mystery and unravelling the knotted threads, the perfection of their art form, the desire to do good, the desire to live well. Recognising their achievements does not mean expressing a view on what gets them up in the morning, but failing to do so reflects appallingly on the organisations charged with leading the industry in the 21st century.
