Introducing South Africa's blacks to a taste of the vine

 Letter from Soweto: The Orlando West Extension, one of Soweto's oldest townships, had never seen the like of it before.

Just a stone's throw from monuments dedicated to the township's sons and daughters who lost their lives fighting the apartheid regime during the Soweto uprising of 1976 stood dozens of stalls displaying South Africa's finest wines, inside a marquee adorned with fluttering flags.

The apartheid regime was particularly brutal for the residents of Orlando West Extension, and such brutality gave rise to one of the highest concentrates of anti-apartheid leaders to be found anywhere in the country.

Indeed, if you made the short walk from the Ubuntu Kraal - where the festival was staged - to nearby Vilakazi Street, you would find yourself on the only street in the world where two Nobel peace laureates, Nelson Mandela and former bishop Desmond Tutu, have homes.

Joyce Mabuza, a Soweto resident for 43 years, had certainly never seen such a grandiose display in her neighbourhood before last Friday's opening night.

"It is strange to see all this here. I remember being chased by the police through the streets nearby during the old days; so to see such a turnaround is strange, very strange," she said as she was being instructed by a wine producer to swirl her glass of red wine to see "if it had legs".

Billed as Soweto's first wine festival, the three-day event was put on by the country's wine industry to showcase more than 500 local wines from 86 estates to what is considered a massive, but largely untapped, market within its own borders: the new black middle-class.

In terms of alcohol consumption in South Africa, the stereotypical perception has always been that wine was the preserve of the country's four million whites, with the tens of millions of blacks preferring beer.

But, due to the strengthening of the South African rand against other currencies over the past few years, wine exports have declined somewhat, and the industry has decided to look internally to counteract the fall in sales.

According to the South African Wine Industry Trusts chairman, Gavin Pieterse, the latest drive is designed to challenge racial perceptions and popularise the drink in black society. But he is under no illusions when it comes to how difficult a task reversing the affects of apartheid on the nation's alcohol industry will be.

"The historical fact is that black people were by design prevented from drinking most types of alcohol under the apartheid regime. They were only allowed to drink a traditional beer made from crushed wheat called Sergum Beer," Mr Pieterse said.

"The object was not to allow black people to trade in alcohol, as it's a very lucrative market which the ruling regime wanted to keep for the whites to exploit". The racist regime went a step further and introduced the "Dop" payment system, whereby blacks who worked for wine-producers were remunerated with cheap, badly-produced wine. As a consequence, they never really saw money.

"If you drink a lot of alcohol it stunts the brain, so the system stopped many black communities from questioning their surroundings. There is a lot of baggage associated with the industry," concedes Mr Pieterse.

Racial segregation also decided who drank with whom, and in many places beer-drinking was restricted to white-owned beer halls. The profits from these establishments were then used to fund the administration boards that oversaw the segregation.

With the industry's history in mind, one of the highlights of the wine festival was the introduction of 10 wines owned by South Africa's black economic empowerment farms, a system designed to bring some equilibrium to an industry dominated by white men.

Lindiwe Wines are the first black-owned wine-producers in South Africa. Vice-chairwoman Libby Petterson says they do not own an estate, but source their grapes from existing farms and then use their own winemaker to produce.

"The long-term goal is to buy an estate, but it takes about 10 years before you can actually sell wine from your own vineyard, so this approach is the best way into the market for us," she says.

Eighteen months ago an industry that has an annual turnover of nearly €2 billion was less than 1.5 per cent black-owned, and for Mr Pieterse one of the great challenges is to overturn that so the industry reflects the national demographics.