Guest column: So who exactly is the ‘premium’ wine buyer?

VAT hikes, increased government spending and a debt that amounts to 76% of our GDP. There’s no better time than March 2025 to be a wine drinker! But amongst the doom and gloom of news headlines, there’s a half full glass: according to our Treasury, the group of people who personally earn more than R30K per month is outgrowing inflation, and the group of individuals who personally earn more than R1 million a year has been growing around 20% a year for the past four years. The rich may be getting richer, but there are also more people getting rich.

For the past 12 years, we’ve been studying the behaviour of this group of consumers: the TopEnders, aka the 3.6 million adults who live in households earning more than R40K per month. Why? Because as soon as you start talking premium goods like cars, expensive watches, offshore investments, and wine that costs more than R100 a litre, it’s fair to assume that the vast majority is sold into this segment of the market. And boy, do they love their wine.

Who are ‘they’? Well, the data shows that right now, wine is the beverage of choice for TopEnders with 44% ticking the box: that’s around 1,6 million individuals. Of them, only 27% live in the Western Cape, 70% of whom are white and only 49% are under 50.  But, and it’s a big BUT, 40% of them live 1 750 meters above sea level and 1 200 kilometers north-east of Cape Town. That’s a relatively big skew. Here’s the rub: in Gauteng, 60% of them are under the age of 50 and 65% are BIPOC adults. So that’s what the majority of the premium wine target market looks like right here, right now. Joburg and Cape Town are two very different movies.

Inside that demographic reality sits what I believe to be wine’s biggest challenge: the upper end of our income economy is fed by youth, and younger people might eat more, drink more and play more, but they are also excessively promiscuous, new-to-category consumers who are led more by current trends than legacy, and who are constantly looking for guidance and suggestion.

Of those traits, promiscuity has the biggest impact. In short, wine is not in competition with wine, it’s up against anything remotely fermented. TopEnd drinkers who consume tequila, whisky, brandy and cognac, for example, are just flat-out piss-cats, drinking an average of 4.5 other categories. Rum drinkers will knock back just about anything.

Winos, on the other hand, are the most ‘loyal’ alcohol drinkers of all, but still the average cork-popper regularly consumes at least two other types of alcoholic beverage. 39% of wine drinkers drink beer, 34% drink gin, 33% whisky and 24% cider. So the booze ocean is big, and red and cluttered and not plain sailing at all for brands trying to get in on the act.

Then there’s the ‘guidance’ challenge which in the modern consumer world, is a euphemism for advertising and marketing. Big bucks rule the winelist waves. It’s the simplest explanation behind one of the more extraordinary stats I’ve ever seen quoted on Winemag: “Of 9,296 SKUs in the wine market, just 496 (5%) are the ones generating 80% of the sales.”

You only have to look at the stats regarding the difference in variety preference between Gauteng and the Cape to see what’s happening, or not happening. TopEnd winos in the Cape are most likely to drink Cab Sav where in Gauteng, Merlot still rules supreme. In the Cape, they are 50% more likely to be drinking Shiraz and 100% more likely to be quaffing Cinsault.

White wine is more even with Sauvignon Blanc the juice of choice in both regions (almost 50% of wine drinkers saying they drink the stuff). But when you look at Chenin Blanc, it’s two different universes. Chenin is by some margin the second favourite white in the Cape with 46% ticking the box, but in Gauteng only 30% say they enjoy it. In fact, for Gautengers, Chardonnay is the second choice by miles. And let’s not even start with pink wines and the Jozi penchant for sweet rosé!

The data tells a simple story: we’ve been trucking wine over the Cape Fold mountains for 300 years, but there’s still a massive divide between the people who make the wine, and those who drink it. And it’s a gap hungrily filled by the big players, creating vanilla wine lists all over the Vaal filled with three ladies from the Cape and a couple of Burgs. Quality product, to be sure, but I can’t help feeling it’s a monopolistic model with unfortunate side effects: it’s pegged wine as something altogether too predictable and boring for new generation of thirsty people with cash to burn.

Are there glimmers of hope? Sure. Recently I found myself in a place called Proud Mary a short walk from the Rosebank Gautrain station which has just won the prestigious LUXE award for Hotel Restaurant of the Year. And I can’t help thinking that they owe it in no small part to their sommelier: a woman called Katlego Mathobela.

This 30-year-old wine fan, armed only with a WSET Level 3 and a corkscrew, has taken TopEnd Gauteng on a wild ride, far away from the comfort zone of wines made by mulitple generations of the same family. We’re talking Mother Rock, Craven, Blacksmith, Dainty Bess Cap Classique, Lowerland et al. And they are flying out the cellar. It’s the kind of experience that makes you wonder if what’s needed to breathe new life into the premium wine segment might be more of a marketing job than anything else. We don’t actually need more customers: They already exist. What would really shift the needle, though, is a whole herd of Kats.

• Brandon de Kock is a writer, photographer, speaker and consumer-insight specialist. During daylight hours, he is the director of storytelling for WhyFive, a leading South African marketing consultancy that specialises in understanding the top 30 percent of the population by income and have conducted the annual Brandmapp study for the past 11 years.