Editorial: The Stormers get it. The Proteas less so. What can wine learn?

I’ve spent the past three Saturdays at DHL Stadium watching the Stormers, and I can assure you they’re doing something right. The Proteas, by contrast, have some soul-searching to do when it comes to attracting crowds to Test cricket.

For the South African wine industry, which is trying to arrest declining consumption and build a meaningful export business, the contrast is instructive. The Stormers show how supporting a team can become a compelling social experience that builds lasting loyalty; the empty stands at Kingsmead suggest that tradition and national pride are not enough to guarantee an audience. Wine faces a similar challenge: making itself relevant to how people want to live today. Producing good wine is no longer enough, if it ever was.

The Stormers averaged 26,153 spectators per game in the 2025/26 United Rugby Championship season, the highest regular-season average in the competition for the third time in five seasons. The first Test between South Africa and Australia at Kingsmead in October, by contrast, attracted fewer than 20,000 spectators over five days. The comparison is imperfect: a five-day Test is a different proposition from a rugby fixture, and Kingsmead attendance was affected by timing, the cost of travel and refreshments, and disruption in Durban. Nevertheless, the contrast is striking.

It is also worth remembering how close professional rugby in the Western Cape came to financial ruin. Western Province Rugby accumulated substantial debt, made poor financial decisions and failed to secure a sustainable way forward. By 2021, SA Rugby had placed the union under administration. Western Province and the Stormers have long been woven into Cape Town’s identity, with generations of supporters invested in their fortunes. It would have been absurd if maladministration had been allowed to destroy a franchise so deeply embedded in the life of the city. The professional rugby operation was eventually taken over by a consortium of investors that included the family of Capitec founder Michiel le Roux. The deal brought in new capital and a different ownership structure, with the aim of putting the Stormers on a more sustainable footing.

New owners do not automatically make better leaders, but the crisis demanded accountability and a willingness to change. The Stormers’ emerging success rests not just on what happens on the field, but on an organisation capable of making decisions and delivering an experience supporters want to return to. Financial recovery and sporting achievement are different things, but both require effective management.

Wine’s leadership problem

The wine industry has its own existential concerns, yet its leadership is considerably more diffuse. Producers, industry bodies, trade and government all have a stake in the sector’s future, but no single organisation has an uncontested mandate to set priorities and be held accountable for reversing declining domestic consumption or building a coherent export programme. The result is too often research, strategy documents and familiar calls for collaboration, with less clarity about who will act.

The current dispute over SAWIS’s certification contract illustrates the problem. The Wine Certification Authority’s decision to terminate its service agreement with SAWIS has raised concerns about the continuity and cost of essential certification and inspection services. South Africa Wine says it was not adequately consulted and has sought legal advice while raising its concerns with the Minister of Agriculture. The full implications remain unclear, but the dispute has exposed tensions between organisations whose cooperation is essential to the industry’s functioning. If the industry struggles to coordinate an essential service, how can it mount a coherent response to the much larger challenges facing its domestic and export markets?

The urgency is clear. South African wine consumption fell by 7.7% in 2025, according to the International Organisation of Vine and Wine. Cost-of-living pressures, changing attitudes to alcohol and competition from other drinks all play a part. So does the declining relevance of wine to people who no longer regard it as an automatic part of social life. These trends cannot simply be marketed away, but neither can the industry afford to treat them as inevitable.

The Stormers understand that a match is an occasion, not merely a contest. The rugby matters, but so do the atmosphere, the shared allegiance and the experience of being there. The club has cultivated a regional identity and given supporters reasons to feel involved beyond the 80 minutes. The product is not just rugby; it is interpersonal engagement.

Wine has quality, history, regional identity and extraordinary diversity. Yet much of the industry’s communication remains directed at people who already understand and care about it. We talk to one another about terroir, heritage, sustainability and premiumisation, then wonder why the wider public seems indifferent. The industry is more comfortable explaining why wine deserves respect than asking why someone who knows little about it should choose a bottle tonight.

The obvious remedies, making wine more accessible, selling the occasion and building loyalty, have been discussed for years. Why, then, has so little changed? Repeating the advice is less useful than examining the obstacles to putting it into practice.

Why the industry struggles to change

One obstacle is structural. The industry comprises hundreds of producers, many small businesses fighting for survival. Each has an incentive to promote its own wines, but less incentive to invest in growing the category as a whole when competitors will benefit too. This is the collective-action problem: the benefits are shared, while the costs fall on those who contribute.

A second obstacle is that the industry has no single set of priorities. Exporters and domestic producers, large companies and small cellars, premium brands and value-focused businesses may all want South African wine to prosper, but they will not necessarily agree on how to achieve it or who should pay. Without an agreed direction, a mandate to lead and accountability for results, collaboration can become an end in itself rather than a means of getting things done.

There is also a cultural obstacle. Wine can be overly attached to its own importance. Expertise, heritage and technical accomplishment are genuine strengths, but they can celebrated for the sake of it. Making wine more relevant requires more than simplified messaging. It means understanding the occasions, budgets and preferences of people outside the industry’s traditional audience, and being prepared to change the offer accordingly.

The Stormers’ experience suggests that recovery starts with confronting an organisation’s problems, not merely promoting its virtues. Their financial crisis required new capital, ownership and a more sustainable operating model. Building supporter loyalty then had a foundation on which to work. Wine, by contrast, too often treats declining consumption as a communications problem when it is also a problem of incentives, governance and execution.

The wine industry does not suffer from a shortage of ideas. It suffers from a shortage of leadership willing to make choices, commit resources and accept responsibility when those choices fail. The uncomfortable question is not what wine should do next. It is why, having known for so long what needs doing, it has been so reluctant to do it.