Soweto Embraces Pleasures of Wine as Troubled History Recedes
Soweto Wine Festival
Hot Salsa Media via Bloomberg
The crowded Soweto Wine Festival. With many Sowetans travelling through heavy traffic to get home at night, the show stays open until 10 p.m. to give people time to arrive and sample the 800 wines offered.
The crowded Soweto Wine Festival. With many Sowetans travelling through heavy traffic to get home at night, the show stays open until 10 p.m. to give people time to arrive and sample the 800 wines offered. Source: Hot Salsa Media via Bloomberg
Sifiso Mangciphu
Renee Bonorchis/Bloomberg
Sifiso Mangciphu, assistant manager of the Morara Wine Emporium. Soweto's only wine shop offers wine tastings every two months.
Sifiso Mangciphu, assistant manager of the Morara Wine Emporium. Soweto's only wine shop offers wine tastings every two months. Photographer: Renee Bonorchis/Bloomberg
South African Bubbly
Renee Bonorchis/Bloomberg
Bottles of South African bubbly at the Morara Wine Emporium. Manager Sifiso Mangciphu says that on average the store sells two bottles of imported Moet & Chandon's Imperial Brut Rose champagne a week.
Bottles of South African bubbly at the Morara Wine Emporium. Manager Sifiso Mangciphu says that on average the store sells two bottles of imported Moet & Chandon's Imperial Brut Rose champagne a week. Photographer: Renee Bonorchis/Bloomberg
Mnikelo Mangciphu
Hot Salsa Media via Bloomberg
Morara Wine Emporium proprietor Mnikelo Mangciphu. Mangciphu helps to organize the Soweto Wine Festival every year.
Morara Wine Emporium proprietor Mnikelo Mangciphu. Mangciphu helps to organize the Soweto Wine Festival every year. Source: Hot Salsa Media via Bloomberg
Morara Wine Emporium
Renee Bonorchis/Bloomberg
A display inside the Morara Wine Emporium in Soweto, South Africa. The store's owner, Mnikelo Mangciphu, helps to organize the Soweto Wine Festival every year.
A display inside the Morara Wine Emporium in Soweto, South Africa. The store's owner, Mnikelo Mangciphu, helps to organize the Soweto Wine Festival every year. Photographer: Renee Bonorchis/Bloomberg
Morara Wine Emporium
Renee Bonorchis/Bloomberg
The exterior of Morara Wine Emporium in Soweto, South Africa. It is the township's only wine shop.
The exterior of Morara Wine Emporium in Soweto, South Africa. It is the township's only wine shop. Photographer: Renee Bonorchis/Bloomberg
Marilyn Cooper, head of South Africa's Cape Wine Academy. Cooper is in her sixth year organizing the Soweto Wine Festival after founding the show in 2005. Photo: Hot Salsa Media via Bloomberg
Sifiso Mangciphu was saved by the bottle.
Like many young, black men in the South African townships of Soweto, near Johannesburg, he was unemployed and had few prospects in an area known for its poverty and once feared for its violence. He got his chance four years ago, when he went to work in his uncle Mnikelo’s wine shop. He hasn’t looked back.
“I couldn’t find a job,” Mangciphu, 28, said in an interview inside the Morara Wine Emporium, Soweto’s only such store, which taps the growing number of black middle-class residents. “I decided to come to work here. It’s great.”
The emporium, which opened in 2005, was inspired by the Soweto Wine Festival. This year’s event, which opens tomorrow, has attracted 82 of the country’s more than 500 wineries. About a dozen of those attending have black owners.
“Wine drinking in Soweto has increased,” Mangciphu said, in part thanks to the festival’s success in offering drinkers an alternative to beer in a market dominated by SABMiller Plc, the world’s second-largest brewery.
In its sixth year, the festival is organized by Marilyn Cooper, head of the Cape Wine Academy, and Mnikelo Mangciphu. For the first time, it will stretch to three nights instead of two to keep up with demand and now runs for as long as Rand Merchant Bank’s WineX, in the business hub of Sandton, which started in 2000.
(Standard Bank Group Ltd., Africa’s largest lender, has withdrawn its sponsorship from the Soweto event after two years of declining profit following the economic slowdown.)
“The white market is decreasing, the black market is growing,” Cooper, 61, said.
Wine Consumption
While South Africa is the world’s seventh-largest wine producer, its per capita consumption ranks it as No. 30, with people drinking an average of 7.5 liters a year, according to South African Wine Industry Information & Systems statistics. That compares with France’s average of 54 liters.
“That’s why it’s important to grow this market and because black people see wine as aspirational,” Cooper said. “This is not a Eurocentric wine festival, it’s an African festival. The music is loud and pumping.”
In the Western Cape, where South African wine estates began after Dutch settlers first came to the continent in the 1600s, many of the farms are still owned by Afrikaner families.
Cultural Thing
“You’re taking white, Afrikaner males from the Cape and putting them behind a table to serve black people,” Cooper said. It’s been a “very big cultural thing” in a country where perceptions haven’t always changed.
Some companies, including KWV, owned by South Africa’s biggest wine and liquor producer, Distell Group Ltd., are starting to take the black market seriously while others haven’t shifted, she said.
KWV used to exhibit its sweet and low-priced Pearly Bay range at the festival, according to Cooper. This year, for the first time, it is also featuring its award-winning Cathedral Cellars brand, she said.
“Soweto is the hottest, coolest place to be at the moment,” Rose Jordaan, who runs the wine farm Bartinney in Stellenbosch, said. Her husband, Michael Jordaan, who started rejuvenating the family’s land in 2006 and who is head of FirstRand Ltd.’s banking unit, First National Bank, said the label his estate is taking to the show is called Noble Savage.
One-third of the people who attend the festival are from Soweto and most are in their 30s, earning up to 15,000 rand ($2,029) a month, according to the Cape Wine Academy’s statistics. Many were born in Soweto and moved out when they got jobs in the city, Cooper said.
Party With Kids
“People go home to Soweto to party on the weekend,” she said. “They take their kids to see their grandparents. That’s the party we’re tapping into.”
On average, about 15 percent of festival-goers are white, she said, while black attendance is growing and visitors are coming from as far away as Gabon and Nigeria.
Mangciphu, who will be working at Morara’s stall, said he’s tasted about 70 percent of the emporium’s stock and developed a palate. He counts himself as lucky in a country that has the highest unemployment rate of 62 nations tracked by Bloomberg.
“The festival helps,” he said. “When people go there and taste something they like, here is the only place in Soweto you can find what you liked.”
-- Editors: Richard Vines, Jim Ruane.
To contact the writer on the story: Renee Bonorchis in Johannesburg at rbonorchis@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Edward Evans at eevans3@bloomberg.net Mark Beech at mbeech@bloomberg.net.
Rate These Stories
Rate this Page