South African wine's long fight for justice

It was pruning season in the South African winter. “It was excruciatingly cold,” remembers Johan Reyneke “and I was wearing a surfing wetsuit to keep warm. And then I realised my [black] colleagues were using newspaper under their clothes. And I thought, we’ve got to fix this.”

That was the late 1990s: Reyneke’s solution, in the biodynamic wine company he founded in 2000, was to commit to buy his workers houses and to send their children to university. “It was financially disastrous,” admits Reyneke, and remains a work in progress, though the sixth employee house will be bought this year.

Such initiatives make a real difference to workers in an industry where social justice looms larger than anywhere else in the wine world. South Africa remains a profoundly unequal country where apartheid still casts a long shadow.

That legacy’s racial dynamics can come as a shock arriving from a first-world, multicultural city like London as I did last month. All of the people you see working in the fields, or walking beside the road or waiting for minibuses are, without exception, black. But just a kilometre down the road in the well-heeled wine town of Franschhoek, at least 95 per cent of the tourists in the tasting rooms and restaurants are white.

Pay is just part of the challenge. All of the producers I visited paid wages above market rates: the rural minimum wage rose just this week to R (Rand) 5,614 (£244/$306) a month – about £1.20/$1.50 an hour. For example Spier, just outside Stellenbosch, pay their field labourers R7,290/month – around a 30 per cent premium.

Yet in many places, the workforce lives on the farm as well as working there. At Bosman Wines, most of the workers and their families have lived on site for generations. Bosman has now built a crèche and community learning centre in the village near their Wellington farm, as well as a retirement complex.

Likewise when Andrew Gunn bought Iona in 1997, it came with the workers and their families in a village on the property. Today the village houses around 80 people, the extended families of 20 workers. “We have a responsibility as farmers,” says Gunn.

This is why the certification scheme run by the Wine and Agricultural Ethical Trade Association (WIETA) covers not only pay and working conditions but also includes inspection of workers’ housing, conducted every three years. Last year WIETA certified around two thirds of South African wine production: certification is required by many international wine buyers. “Any producer that is successfully exporting knows they have to do the right thing to get into foreign supermarkets,” says Cathy Brewer of Villiera Wines.

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