Vintner Adds Color to S. Africa’s Wine Industry

A Congolese wine lover who has penetrated this country’s exclusive wine industry wants to cultivate African palates while marketing what he hopes will be an outstanding product.

Telecommunications tycoon Miko Rwayitare bought the small Mont Rochelle vineyard in the premier Western Cape viniculture region of Franschhoek last year. His main objective is to create a variety that will revolutionize the quality of South African wine and the way it is perceived both at home and abroad.

But Rwayitare is also having a pioneering impact on the industry.

Although no statistics are available for the number of nonwhites with leading positions in this country’s wine business, industry watchers here believe that Rwayitare is the first black to fully own a winery in South Africa.

His entry into this elite club comes at a time when the country is navigating a complex path toward integrating the hierarchy of a profession that was once reserved exclusively for whites.

“Everybody told me I was crazy,” said Rwayitare, 59, recalling how friends and colleagues reacted when he announced that he was going to spend about 16 million rand--the equivalent today of about $1.4 million--to purchase Mont Rochelle, despite the fact that he knew nothing about the wine business.

“But they said the same thing when I started the mobile phone business in Africa,” he said. “I don’t see why I can’t succeed.”

Established in 1985, Rwayitare’s cellular phone company, Telecel, is doing a thriving trade in 14 African nations, and that’s where he eventually hopes to make a significant dent with an exclusive, so-called icon wine that would sell for about $20 a bottle. He hopes to have it in circulation by 2007.

Already, South Africa is the seventh-largest wine-producing country--ahead of Chile, Australia and New Zealand. However, skeptics believe that Rwayitare’s presence as a person of color among the upper echelon of the wine business will remain a rarity for a long time, because progress toward black empowerment in the field is still incremental.

“There is an imbalance in the industry today in terms of black and white,” said Jabulani Ntshangase, a veteran wine company manager who is black. “It is man-made, orchestrated to keep blacks out, so that even eight years after our democracy, there are still some walls. There is an invisible electric fence.”

Ntshangase goes to high schools and talks to students from disadvantaged backgrounds about possible careers in viniculture and oenology that would allow them to become winemakers and vineyard owners, as opposed to just field laborers.

At Western Cape province’s Stellenbosch University, there are 24 undergraduates pursuing degrees in agriculture with majors in viniculture and oenology, Ntshangase said. Their education is primarily funded by the South African Wine Industry Trust as part of an affirmative action program to get more blacks into the business.

But even this program has built-in obstacles. Since the first black wine industry students enrolled at Stellenbosch in 1997, only one has graduated.

Mzokhona Mvemve, 26, took six years, instead of the normal four, because of language difficulties. Stellenbosch has historically taught courses in Afrikaans, typically a third language for blacks.

Although Mvemve was able to submit work in English, his second language--in which he is proficient--most of the literature, lectures and textbooks for the course were in Afrikaans.

“You can imagine being in a class and being lectured in a medium you don’t really understand. That was a struggle,” Mvemve said. “I started to learn just to pass, rather than to really get to know the subject.”

Black Stellenbosch students also find themselves at a disadvantage in the traditionally conservative winery world when they try to gain on-the-job experience.

Still, Mvemve has no hesitation about entering a profession that has typically been viewed as elitist. On the contrary, he is eager to become a role model in his chosen field.

“My being there is going to change the whole picture of the industry,” he said.

Supporters of black empowerment in the wine industry are hopeful that changing the racial mix in the top ranks will also help transform the perception of wine and its limited consumption among average blacks. That, in turn, could help boost domestic sales.

“Wine is not really part of the African culture and lifestyle,” said Vaughan Johnson, who owns a prestigious wine shop at Cape Town’s trendy Victoria & Alfred Waterfront. “African people are largely beer drinkers.”

Ntshangase insists that acquiring a taste for wine is just a matter of becoming properly acquainted with the product.

“Tell me one person who is born with a wine gene in their system, or a beer gene,” he said. “It’s all exposure and education.”

Rwayitare, the owner of Mont Rochelle, would no doubt subscribe to that theory.

While acknowledging that he has no formal qualifications in wine production, he is adamant that relying on his business acumen, and taste buds, will help him to succeed.

“What I know is good wine from around the world, and I appreciate wine,” said Rwayitare, who believes that South Africa sells its wine for far less than it’s worth. The most expensive wine at his winery costs less than $5.

“The only way to make a profit in the wine business is to produce exclusive wine,” said Johnson, the merchant. “The best way to make a large fortune in the wine industry is to start with a high profit.”

That’s what Rwayitare plans to do. To achieve his goal of manufacturing an A-grade wine, 80% of which he hopes to export, he has embarked on a multimillion-dollar project to restructure his 82-acre estate, including revamping the cellar to make it more globally competitive.

He is also negotiating contracts with some of the country’s leading growers who already cultivate superior grapes--the key to producing a superior wine, according to Justin Hoy, cellar master at Mont Rochelle.

Ethnicity aside, Rwayitare’s success will ultimately depend on the grade of his vineyard’s soil, the cooperation of the weather and the quality of his vines, Hoy said. And Rwayitare’s confidence, enthusiasm and willingness to take risks may in the end be remembered far more than his race.

“In every industry you should have a maverick, and [in the wine industry] Miko could be that maverick,” Hoy said.

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Simmons was recently on assignment in Franschhoek.