South Africa’s wine industry will be starting things off with a bang next year. This follows South Africa Wine’s intention to invest more in black-owned and locally produced wine brands and wine farms.
Karin Kleinbooi, the newly appointed executive manager of transformation and development at South Africa Wine, told Food For Mzansi that her mission for the first six months was to go through 109 wine bottles produced by black-owned wine producers and black wine farms.
Ensuring diversity, integration and inclusion
She said her reasoning for doing all that was that she envisioned a more diverse wine industry than in 2023 in the coming year and beyond.
Kleinbooi explained that she and her team are working towards a shared transformation agenda and for her, the exciting part is that she has now seen with the transition that there is an opportunity for them to consider the challenges and change them into an opportunity, and she wants to see different ways they can put diversity into a glass.
“I am much more aware of the people who end up in my glass and wine and I want to make sure that there is integration, diversity, inclusion.
“We are seeing a whole young chord of black people who are interested in getting into the industry and they are passionate go-getters who are not waiting for handouts. They are innovative in their thinking in terms of how they can leverage support and these are things that will inspire me into the next year,” said Kleinbooi.
Exciting plans for 2024
Expressing her excitement for 2024, Kleinbooi elaborated that she wants to go back to looking at partnerships to strategically see how the industry can pull its resources and mobilise its strengths and the connections that it has.
“There is really a great need for us to move towards sector collaboration and learn from each other and try and test what has been working and what not. By the end of next year, I will have a great story to tell about what we have done because we are changing the approaches we taking in supporting black-owned brands.
“We also want to focus on black wine farms because we want to have a much more systemic approach where we take them through the pipeline and it’s a long-term process,” she said.
She added that she and her team are already working with key institutions like the government and are extending their search to more support into the industry externally, including international entities like the European Union (EU).
“There are a lot of opportunities and I am hoping that by the end of next year, the face of the wine industry will look much more diverse than it does this year. From next year we are going to start changing the narrative of the industry,” she said.
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‘A brilliant opportunity for black-owned wine brands’
Meanwhile, for the co-founder and director of Ayana Wine, Nandipha Masiso, the investment and interest from South Africa Wine in supporting black-owned wines would give them a chance to compete in an already saturated industry because these funds would help brands create brand awareness to infiltrate the market.
“The future is going to be quite interesting, people have started to take notice of black-owned brands and seem to be interested in knowing the story behind the brand, that is what attracts people to buy the wine.
“I have also noticed that some brands are moving from the conventional ways of wine-making by producing organic wines while others are dipping into the past and producing honey-infused wines,” she said.
For Masiso, it is exciting to see that people are now interested in black-owned wine brands as the brands established before have struggled for years to be put up on shelves. She told Food For Mzansi that after her trade mission in Denmark, she had the opportunity to showcase her brand using an international platform
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