Fermenting Change in S. Africa’s Wine Industry

Five soft-spoken youths nod in unison while tasting a 1995 Warwick pinot noir and listening to Jabulani Ntshangase detail its superior qualities over a lesser vintage they already tried.

They are the first black students in Stellenbosch University’s winemaking program.

Ntshangase, who found his calling in the wine business while studying in the United States, pushed the idea and helped raise their tuition money. Now, he serves as unofficial mentor for the effort to integrate one of South Africa’s most entrenched bastions of white culture.

“If I died today, I’d know I have started something that won’t die,” he said.

Alluding to blacks’ lone role in the business--as grape pickers--Ntshangase unfolded a spotless white napkin from a restaurant table at Spier Properties, where he works as senior wine consultant.

“This is the South African wine industry,” he said. “It’s completely lily white. What I’m looking for is the same thing you look for in good wine: balance.”

He said brewers have recognized blacks as partners, but the wine industry lags behind.

One reason is blacks traditionally have favored beer or liquor. Experts estimate they account for only a tiny fraction of South Africa’s annual per-capita wine consumption of 8 1/2 to 9 1/2 quarts.

But resistance to change also is strong.

“It must be a business decision to do it, not moral,” Ntshangase said. “We’re not here to take away from the wine industry. We’re looking at bringing in 80% of the untapped market.”

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Ntshangase sees his efforts, which also include educating blacks as wine distributors and trying to buy a vineyard, as affirmative action at its best. He wants opportunities, not quotas, calling jobs for unprepared workers a recipe for failure.

There are problems. Stellenbosch, the only South African school to offer a bachelor’s degree in grape-growing and winemaking, still teaches many classes in Afrikaans.

As a result, the five black freshmen are taking the core classes of a similar forestry program so far and petitioning to have the wine classes switched to English by the start of the next school year in February.

Ntshangase said his experience differs from the students’ because he had no one to follow.

“Even if I get to a door that’s not locked, it’s hard to open,” he said. “But I was more advantaged than them. No one was force-feeding me Afrikaans.”

Born in Soweto, the sprawling black township outside Johannesburg, he went to New York in 1979 on a United Nations scholarship. He found a part-time job as a stock boy at Manhattan’s Acker Merrall wine shop.

“I got very interested as a teetotaler in the language of wine,” he said. “I couldn’t understand a wine, which is wet, being described as dry.”

Michael Kapon, president of the store, took Ntshangase under his wing, giving him a reference book on wine.

“It was in the midst of mid-terms, but I started to read,” Ntshangase said. “I read it three times.” He began sampling, and his days as a nondrinker were over.

Kapon recalls Ntshangase as a politically involved young man--he quotes both Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr.--filled with angst about South Africa but also with a growing love of wine.

“The level of frustration he lived with in the United States was extremely difficult for him,” Kapon said.

While Ntshangase was learning what would become his trade, his white-dominated country was changing. Mandela was released from prison in 1990. The following year, Ntshangase returned home for the first time as a buyer for a U.S. wine importer.

“A series of questions hit my brain and heart at the same time: ‘Are there any black winemakers or distributors or vineyard owners?’ ” Ntshangase said. “The answers were: ‘No, no, no.’ How long was I going to play deaf?”

He contacted influential wine industry people, including John Platter, author of South Africa’s most authoritative wine guide, who calls Ntshangase “a breath of fresh air around here.”

He returned for good in February 1995 and persuaded South African Airways to set up a trust fund using fees collected from vineyards seeking consideration of their wines for airline use. The fund paid the tuition of three of the blacks in the wine program; a newspaper article sparked financial backing for the other two.

There are few frills. While most white students live on or near campus, Ntshangase’s charges commute by foot up to 40 minutes each way from black townships.

All five are from distant provinces with no wine industry and never had tasted wine before. Two are from the same high school, where a guidance counselor got them interested. Others heard about the program in the news media.

“My father was reading the newspaper and said he thought it was a good opportunity because there were no black winemakers,” Tshepang Patience Masilo, 19, said.