Editorial: South African wine has a South Africa problem

Mike Ratcliffe of Vilafonté recently posted a fascinating account of a trip to Belgium, Switzerland and Canada. His key insights: fine wine remains commercially viable when buyers are engaged and properly introduced; South African wine has the quality, but availability and recognition lag; and sustained market presence, stronger government support and tourism all have a role to play in accelerating exports.

What makes Ratcliffe’s piece interesting is that it is not wrong. Much of it is almost certainly right. The problem is less whether the observations are true than the story we tell ourselves about what they mean. He has returned from the market with evidence, enthusiasm and orders. Good. But the text also reveals how the wine industry habitually converts anecdote into diagnosis, commercial success into reassurance, and complexity into a story about “opportunity”.

Believe the evidence, interrogate the conclusion

The most persuasive thing in the piece is also the least ideological: I went there, I poured wine, people responded, and they bought it. That is useful evidence.

Ratcliffe is also right to resist generational determinism. The wine industry’s obsession with Millennials and Gen Z often involves treating enormous, internally diverse demographic categories as coherent consumer personalities. The fact that Millennials are now 30–45, and occupy very different economic and social positions from the Millennials imagined by wine marketing a decade ago, is a useful corrective.

Likewise, his observations about Canada are valuable precisely because they are concrete: enthusiastic buyers, inadequate availability, Pinotage as an overdetermined signifier of South Africa, Chenin under-recognised, and innovative producers insufficiently represented. That is substantially more useful than another conference presentation announcing that “young consumers want authenticity”.

My instinct, however, is to ask: what follows from the evidence, and what doesn’t? People that were “pleasantly surprised” is evidence some people were pleasantly surprised by Vilafonté. It isn’t necessarily evidence that fine wine has solved its generational problem. Orders demonstrate commercial opportunity, not necessarily a structural shift in consumer behaviour. These distinctions matter.

Who gets to define the problem?

As ever, I’m inclined to ask how the wine industry creates and reinforces the stories it tells about itself. Who has the authority to say what the wine industry’s problems are, and what counts as legitimate evidence?

The industry has a remarkably elaborate vocabulary for describing itself: generational change, relevance, accessibility, premiumisation, authenticity, sustainability, education, consumer engagement. These terms appear descriptive but are also regulatory. They tell producers what kind of consumer supposedly exists and therefore what kind of wine they should make.

Ratcliffe subtly participates in this discourse while also challenging it. He says, correctly, that “we need to understand what makes [wine] relevant to them”. But notice the pronoun: them. The consumer remains an object of investigation. We – producers, trade, commentators – observe them, understand them, introduce wine to them, explain wine to them.

The more interesting question is whether consumers need to be introduced to wine by an industry that takes its relevance and importance for granted.

Another of Ratcliffe’s phrases is revealing: “we must explain how wine can improve the occasion”. It sounds innocuous, even sensible. But it contains an implicit hierarchy of knowledge: the industry possesses wine knowledge; the consumer possesses an occasion; the professional explains how the former can enhance the latter.

Perhaps. But perhaps consumers are already perfectly capable of deciding what improves their occasions.

The most interesting implication of Ratcliffe’s experience is therefore slightly different from his conclusion: perhaps the industry has been too busy deciding what consumers want from wine rather than giving them the chance to discover what they actually want.

The binaries start to wobble

There are the oppositions embedded in the argument. Young versus old. Fine wine versus ordinary wine. Industry versus consumer. America versus South Africa. Established identity versus innovation. Reputation versus reality. Availability versus demand.

Ratcliffe’s observations depend on these distinctions while simultaneously destabilising them. The “young consumer”, for example, turns out not to be particularly young. Millennials are approaching their strongest earning years. Gen Z is approaching 30. The binary between youth and maturity therefore starts to collapse.

And the most revealing opposition is perhaps reputation versus quality. Ratcliffe says South African wine quality has moved faster than its reputation. That is probably true. But reputation is not some unfortunate cloud floating above objective quality. Reputation is produced through distribution, marketing, tourism, critics, importers, retailers, history and repeated consumer encounters. In other words, reputation is infrastructure.

The slightly uncomfortable conclusion

The danger in wine commentary is not optimism. God knows the industry could use some. The danger is converting an encouraging experience into a reassuring narrative. Ratcliffe’s experience tells us something important: sophisticated buyers and consumers are open to South African wine; excellent wine can surprise them; commercial opportunity exists. It also tells us that availability, communication and sustained market presence matter enormously. But it doesn’t prove that the wider fine-wine market is healthy, that the generational challenge has been overstated, or that government funding will necessarily solve our export problems.

More importantly, it points to a bigger challenge. South Africa doesn’t simply need to be available internationally. It needs to be recognisable. It needs more cachet. Because being a good alternative to American, Australian or Chilean wine isn’t quite enough. An industry can make excellent wine, offer compelling value and still remain an also-ran if consumers don’t instinctively understand why South Africa is somewhere they should look.

We have some of the ingredients: extraordinary places, old vines, distinctive varieties, ambitious producers and a wine culture with genuine depth. The question is whether we can turn those ingredients into something bigger than a collection of individual success stories.

In other words, the task is ultimately to make South Africa itself mean something in the mind of the international wine drinker. Getting listings takes very real graft. Pounding the pavement and showing up are necessary but they aren’t sufficient. It’s not simply about getting more South African wine into the market. It’s to make South Africa harder to forget. And that’s another reason to be so, so grateful to the Springboks.