Is SA wine tracking in the right direction?

Perhaps the most remarkable piece of data to emerge from yesterday’s Vinpro Information Day was that when it comes to profitability measured in terms of net farm income per hectare, 28.1% of producers were outright commercially successful in 2019 compared to just 15% in 2015.

The volume of wine sold is down – 190 million litres less since 2017 – and prices are up, an increase at cellar door in terms of rand per litre of between 43% and 44% from the beginning of 2018 to the end of 2019.

But here’s apparently no such thing as a happy farmer as the concern, at least in some quarters, is that these trends are not the result of a hard-fought premiumization campaign but rather simply the result of wine’s elasticity of demand, global buyers moving to other suppliers on one level and consumers switching to other alcoholic products on another…