The Quiet Deed That Changed Radford Dale Wines Forever

A Decision That Wasn't Really a Decision 

Alex Dale, the British-Burgundian founder of Radford Dale, arrived in South Africa on the back of Nelson Mandela's election in 1994. He didn't come for the wine. He came because of the man. The portrait of Mandela that greets you at the Elgin winery tells you everything you need to know about why he stayed, and why, a decade later, the Land of Hope Trust came into being.

"It wasn't a decision, so to speak," he says. "It sort of happened as a process."

The process began when he started employing people from the local community. He made tea for the cleaning staff. He appointed a nervous young woman over the objections of his partners in the winery he co-founded before starting Radford Dale because he saw, as he puts it, "a spark in her eye." That woman was Heather Whitman. She's now a director and co-owner of Radford Dale.

As the company grew, Dale found himself asking a harder question: beyond careers and decent salaries, what else could a business genuinely do for the people in its orbit? He'd been asked by Rowan Gormley of Virgin Wines to find a South African wine brand worth backing for social impact. He did the research, visited the projects, and tasted the wines. "A lot of them were really dreadful," he says. "A lot of them were smoke and mirrors." So he built his own.

The first Land of Hope vintage was 2006. Virgin Wines placed an order worth R400,000, and the trust was born.

The Weight He Didn't See Coming

What Dale didn't fully anticipate was the pressure. The original funding model was a dedicated range of wines, with 50% of the gross profit going directly to the trust. This meant that if the wines didn't sell, children would have to leave school.

"At one point we had 16 kids in private school," he says. "Can you imagine? I made this cross for myself." He pauses. "That was the one thing I didn't think through properly."

He has since restructured the model entirely. The Winery of Good Hope range, already selling in 40 countries, now generates the trust's income as a percentage of revenue, replacing the standalone Land of Hope label with a more reliable, commercially integrated funding stream. It's a quiet but significant decision, the kind you make after years of lying awake thinking about school fees.

"Either you're committed, or you're not," he says. "And if you're committed, you make it happen."

Quiet by Design

The trust has been running for twenty years. Most people in the South African wine industry have never heard of it. That is entirely intentional.

"If I wanted to publicise it, we could have done," Dale says. "It was never something which we used for appearances. It's something which we've done for our people."

He is sharply allergic to what he calls virtue signalling, the kind of sustainability theatre that has made the word sustainable nearly meaningless. The trust was designed to be sincere first, visible never. It is, as John Platter wrote in his farewell note as outgoing chairman, "not a loud virtue signalling project, more a quiet private enterprise."

The reason this story is being told at all is that 2026 marked twenty years and 21 vintages. Even then, Dale is careful. He doesn't ring his own bell. He just doesn't like it.

A Chair Who Follows Her Own Footsteps

When Platter stepped down after 20 years, he had no obvious successor in mind. Then it came to him. "It's so obvious," he told Dale.

Cathy van Zyl MW, the first Master of Wine on the African continent, accepted the chairmanship of the trust somewhere above Asia, en route to Tokyo, pen in hand. She brings to the role a formidable combination of independence, governance experience, and an unsentimental clarity about what needs to happen next. "Firstly, I have to ensure that the trust meets its mandate," she says. "But I also have to, from time to time, challenge the other trustees and say, do you think we need to review the mandate? It's been twenty years. Are we still in the same situation as when it was written?"

She is untroubled by the new funding model. The wine industry is under enormous pressure, she notes: consumption is falling, markets are crowded, and nobody needs another label competing with itself for shelf space. "If Alex can put 100% into selling the Winery of Good Hope and we get more money from him doing that, fine." She is 120% confident he made the right call, she says, and smiles.

Two Sisters, One Story

Heather Whitman has been with Radford Dale since the beginning and has become a director and co-owner. Her sister, Veronica Adonis, joined years later, a single mother from the hospitality industry who had been keeping her head above water. Both are now trustee beneficiaries. Both have daughters—and Veronica has two granddaughters—whose education is funded by the trust.

When asked whether, in thirty years working alongside Alex Dale, she ever wrote a resignation letter, Heather replied, "Not once." Veronica, however, told a different story. "I had it in my pocket for months." She carried it, undelivered, through a period of deep self-doubt, right up until the end-of-year assessment when Dale praised her in terms she didn't feel she'd earned. "The company has that belief in you that you don't even have in yourself," she says.

That, more than any structural mechanism, is the real engine of the trust. Dale didn't just fund children's school fees. He unlocked people.

Heather puts it simply: "I am who I am today because someone saw potential and believed in me."

Both women tear up when they talk about what the trust has meant. "These things just don't happen," Heather says. "Where we come from, you just don't expect something like this. And for it to be done so selflessly."

The Living Proof

Alicia Whitman is now in her second year of a BA in Psychology at Helderberg College. She missed the application cutoff for Stellenbosch University by one mark. She calls it a blessing. Her lecturers believe in her. She has found her people.

She speaks about helping others with a warmth that doesn't sound rehearsed. She talks about standing with a bucket filling with water, getting heavier and heavier, arms burning, and the relief of just letting it go. She's learned that from living it, not from a textbook.

When asked whether she's ever thought, in the quiet moments, what her life would look like without the trust, she pauses. Her answer is about her mother first. "Heather would have found a way," she says. "Heather always finds a way." But when she sits with the question honestly, she understands something broader: "I really don't know where I would have been if it wasn't for all these amazing people and this help."

Then, almost to herself: "I'm thinking now, why me? What am I doing? Why am I so special?"

She is not yet fully aware that she is the answer to that question. The trust set out to change lives. She is a life changed. She wants to become a counsellor because she knows what it feels like to be overlooked and misunderstood. She wants to be there for people who need someone to listen.

In that ambition, the trust has done something no funding model fully accounts for. It didn't just open a school gate. It shaped a person who will spend her working life opening doors for others.

What Your Bottle Does

The Land of Hope Trust has supported 34 children (16 currently), disbursed over R6.5 million, and carried families through moments: the death of a mother, a gap year, a one-mark shortfall, a first aeroplane flight, a private medical operation—when the alternative would have been just the weight of the impossible.

None of that appears on the label.

Alex Dale doesn't want it to. He finds the chest-beating version of all this deeply cynical, and he's probably right. But here's what's worth knowing the next time a bottle of Winery of Good Hope crosses your path.

Someone chose to build something sincere in a country that needed it, quietly, for twenty years, without telling anyone. And a young woman is studying to become a counsellor because she knows what it feels like to be without someone by your side, and she never wants anyone else to feel that way.

That's what a bottle of wine can actually do.

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