Michael Fridjhon: Challenging the myths about Johannesburg’s wine culture

I mulled for over a month on how best to respond to Christian Eedes’s editorial published on 17 March and headed “The Great Divide – Cape Town vs. Johannesburg market realities”. There was much to what he said which could be regarded as factual. “…it can feel occasionally that we’re preaching to the converted. Looking at our users by city for the last 12 months, Cape Town makes up 31% and the entire Gauteng region 20%. It’s even more of an issue for many boutique wineries, Gauteng – South Africa’s economic heartland – remains a distant, largely untapped market….This raises important questions: Is the divide between the two regions driven by demand, logistics, or perhaps cultural and socio-economic factors?”

Unfortunately there was also comment which at best reflected the divide and, at worst, was simply ill-informed and parochial. Perhaps the most offensive – or perhaps the most controversial – was “Despite Johannesburg’s high disposable income, wine culture in the city lags far behind that of Cape Town” though the following comes a close second: “While Cape Town’s wine culture is more about mindful appreciation, Johannesburg tends to favour conspicuous consumption, where status is often displayed through visible wealth, such as expensive cars, clothes, and lavish lifestyles.”

I’m curious to know where (that is, from which digit or orifice) our esteemed editor sourced that information. I suspect he’s spent more time in Europe in the past year than in Johannesburg. I’m not sure he’s ever been to WineX, an event which sees over 8 000 wine enthusiasts at the Sandton Convention Centre every year. This is an audience the vast majority of whom are black, middle class and not necessarily quaffing Moët, or Clicquot or Johnnie Walker as their everyday beverage of choice.

Of course, to every caricature there is at least a grain of truth. Johannesburg probably has a higher density of tenderpreneurs than anywhere else in SA. Naturally (so the logic goes) all wine consumers in the City of Gold “favour conspicuous consumption…expensive cars, clothes and lavish lifestyles.”

The comments which followed his article do not appear to have emanated from wine drinkers in Johannesburg (perhaps because, as the editor himself noted, there are relatively fewer Winemag readers in Johannesburg). One of those who did comment focused rightly on the issue referred to in the main piece – the logistical challenges of doing business at a distance, especially if you are a hipster winery with a ready market for your small production less than two hours drive from your cellar.

If you are a boutique producer based in Paarl, Elgin or the Swartland you don’t need to employ the services of a distributor. Nor do you need to surrender around 30% of your revenue for sales and logistical support. And you can develop a rapport with the folk who draft the wine-lists in the Mother City. So in a way this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. No one knows who you are outside of the circle of your acquaintance – and the cost of widening that circle is prohibitive, relative to the volumes you produce.

Once every five or ten years an Eben Sadie or Chris Alheit comes along and escapes the gravitational field of the Cape’s boutique-model death-star. David Clarke at Ex Animo (whose sales director is actually Christian Eedes’s wife, a material disclosure usually missing in all the plugs which promote Ex Animo wines on the Winemag website) has done a great deal to make things easier for hipster producers: slowly more and more of the brands he represents are starting to appear on wine lists in Gauteng. How they are doing this is central to the discussion. They are engaging with the trade in exactly the same way that they have been in the Cape: their wines are being “talked” into the establishments by the producer who personally engages with the wine service team and/or the proprietor.

Once wine is properly made – in other words, without visible defects – from quality fruit sourced from a site capable of yielding a wine of some complexity, the most important message is the backstory. This involves both the category itself and the face behind the brand. Older appellations – Bordeaux or Champagne – depend more on the brand message of the category as a whole; more modern ones depend both on the personality of category (the Swartland is geeky in the way that the Medoc is aristocratic and traditional) as well as the individual behind the brand (Antinori or Sadie, for example). It is because the young hipster winemakers are working the Cape market so assiduously that they have done so well there. It is not because, as Eedes asserted in his column “Cape Town’s wine culture is more about mindful appreciation, Johannesburg tends to favour conspicuous consumption”

Finally, there is I think a much more obvious reason why smaller Cape producers battle to gain traction in Gauteng. It’s the same reason that, for example, the London market is harder to crack for producers everywhere than say San Francisco is for Californian winemakers. It has no loyalty to any one appellation. Much of the wine sold in Cape Town’s restaurants goes to the huge tourist traffic which descends on the city for the summer. Visitors to a wine region want to drink the wines produced there and they are dependent on the sommeliers who work in the restaurants for guidance. It pays hipster winemakers to invest time in them, to chat them up, to supply them with the motivations they will need to on-sell the wines.

Gauteng is a market with only a passing loyalty to the Cape. It’s even possible to argue that given the political divide separating the two administrations there isn’t an automatic affinity. If the Cape’s winemakers want to see their treasures on Gauteng’s wine lists, they could start by “kuiering” a little.

• Michael Fridjhon has over thirty-five years’ experience in the liquor industry. He is the founder of Winewizard.co.za and holds various positions including Visiting Professor of Wine Business at the University of Cape Town; founder and director of WineX – the largest consumer wine show in the Southern Hemisphere and chairman of The Trophy Wine Show.