How community service is vital to what Journey's End stands for | #wineforgood

It was in the late 1980s that a United Nations commission, chaired by Norway’s first female prime minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland, set out to officially define “sustainability” as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.

It is a helpful definition because the term is so often synonymous with environmental actions, usually remedies related to climate change, yet sustainability is also about people and their livelihoods, right down to basic sustenance, something that is well understood at Journey’s End, one of South Africa’s foremost wine producers.

Choose one of its bottles from a shelf, or a wine list, and you will find yourself – appropriately enough – at the end of a journey, described as a “grape to glass exercise”: an all-embracing, holistic approach to sustainability that starts with the vines and those who tend to them, encompasses biodiversity, and extends to feeding and supporting the neighbouring community in the informal settlement at Sir Lowry’s Pass, close to Somerset West.

The Western Cape is famously blessed with a temperate climate and the most stunning scenery, and the estate – nestled amongst the Schapenberg hills, in the shadow of the Helderberg mountain, with the vines marching down the slopes towards False Bay, where the ocean meets the sky – is no exception.

Helderberg is known locally as "the shining mountain" because it is illuminated by the setting sun. At the south-easterly end of the Stellenbosch region, it is a peaceful place of radiant beauty, yet the vines are surrounded by rolling razor wire and a network of CCTV cameras, reminding us of the social challenges the country still faces.

The journey begins

Journey’s End had seen better days when the Gabb family, from Shropshire, first fell for its charms in the mid 90s, just as South Africa emerged from the apartheid era with its first democratically elected president, Nelson Mandela.

Roger Gabb – a wine entrepreneur whose credits include the Kumala brand – set about building a house and renovating the estate to make the most of its 350 million-year-old decomposed granite soils and their proximity to the coast. Riding the wave of a newly liberated South African wine industry, the first Journey’s End wine was released in 2004.

Today, Roger’s son, Rollo Gabb – who once ran raves at Manchester’s legendary Hacienda nightclub and is now a director of Harts Group, whose restaurants include Barrafina and Quo Vadis – is at the helm of the 140 hectare estate, and he has been instrumental in focusing Journey’s End on minimal intervention winemaking, combined with a social conscience.

A foundation is born

In 2020, Gabb established the Journey’s End Foundations to bring together its ongoing social projects and to try to avert a humanitarian crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Just as seeing the vines can make sense of a wine, witnessing the work of the Foundation first-hand, getting stuck in at the soup kitchen, brings to life the commitment the brand has made to its community, from which its vineyard and winery workers are drawn.

As the world ground to a halt in those early months of the new decade and the word ‘lockdown’ entered the global lexicon, the sprawling settlement at Sir Lowry’s Pass, and other areas like it, were staring into the abyss: with no opportunity to work, no benefits system, and next to nothing to eat.

The Foundation had an early goal to provide food for 10,000 meals a week; by September 2021, it had reached the milestone of providing a million meals; and it has now provided around six million, as demand has continued post pandemic.

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