If you want one individual with the vision, experience and expertise to sum up the macro issues facing the global wine industry, alongside the micro challenges of running their own family wine business then it has to be South Africa’s Bruce Jack, who is as much a sage, a philosopher, and world commentator as he is a winemaker and brand owner of Bruce Jack Wines. Here in his own inimitable style he shares the highs, lows, ups and downs of 2025 and gives his unique perspective on how the global wine industry can maximise its opportunities as well as guard against the many head winds the sector faces.
How do you look back on 2025 as a business and where you are in terms of reaching your targets and goals?
While we hit our financial targets, we clearly underperformed in a few key areas. As it wore on, 2025 became an increasingly cumbersome and difficult year.
Like many I have ‘to do’ lists I look at everyday – the personal and business ones are all jumbled up.
At the end of 2024 I wrote down two primary and simple goals I would be forced to look at everyday:
- Build transition time (buffer time) into the workday.
- Always be on time for meetings.
‘Transition time’ had always felt like wasted time. But in 2024 it had cost us dearly.
I was bound for a critical early morning meeting with a large national retailer in Cape Town – usually a three-hour drive. As I drove off the estate, the swinging beam of my headlights picked out a young lamb caught in the barbed wire fence. I couldn’t contact my neighbour, so I pulled the fencing pilers out of the glove compartment and spent the next 20 minutes freeing her and repairing the fence where I had cut it.
As a result, two and a half hours later, I was myself ensnared in Cape Town rush-hour traffic and was hopelessly late for the meeting. When I arrived at reception, jeans encrusted with mud, I was told we had missed our slot.
Despite apologetic, pleading emails, we haven’t been invited back. It’s not a case of ‘Hell hath no fury like a buyer scorned’, but rather that buyers, especially powerful ones, have too much choice, and I provided a convenient excuse not to bother with yet another supplier.
As 2025 dawned, I was determined such tardiness wouldn’t negatively impact us again. I not only built in buffer time between trips and meetings, but daily tasks. I even set alarms towards the ends of meetings.
Constant planning ahead in this way gave me that ‘master-of-the-universe’ sense of control over the daily itinerary. It felt great, like I was one of those 5am freaks killing it on Wall Street. It also felt a bit like constantly allowing the future to take precedence over the present. Maybe that’s the point, I decided. I embraced the new rigidity with zealot-like adherence.
Previously, I was often a few minutes late for meetings, jumping from one Teams call to the next, with hardly a moment to make tea, or being delayed while travelling, by some unexpected dislocation from the harried plan, like a lamb in a barbed wire fence.
Always being on time had other positive knock-on effects – we felt more efficient and we churned through mountains of work. Things seemed to function better – less meetings were cancelled and increasingly sophisticated apps sent an endless stream of on-line meeting notes into the sewers of AI data centres. And as we all know punctuality proves to others you are professional and courteous – albeit in the same way going to church proves you are a good person.
With so many wines in your portfolio where do you have to focus more of your time?
We have dozens of different brands and hundreds of wines, and I have a deep aversion to putting the same wine under different labels – that feels like blasphemy, so we have multiple different blends on the go at any one time.
The whole blending and bottling process, from when the forecast model tells us it’s time to beef up the inventory, takes eight weeks. There’s an extra week built in to double-check the initial blend, which we do 10 days after the first trial (or ‘bench’) blend, because atmospheric pressure, and a few other factors, can throw one off when tasting.
In the same way the Golden Ratio is used in architecture to structure aesthetically and harmonious design (The Parthenon, etc…) so there is a law that governs a harmonious wine blend– part organoleptic, part organic chemistry, part physics, part logistical, part meteorological, part financial, part astrological, part gut feel, and part weighing up the risk and reward to how the process will proceed – like the reward of removing filtration with the risk of refermentation in bottle.
The Golden ration of wine blending is something that slowly and mysteriously reveals itself to you well after Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule – and all winemakers who’ve been at the craft long enough will attest to it. It’s not something I am naturally good at and it’s not something you learn at university – it’s something I’ve learnt to be good at through decades of practice.
And with experience it’s easy to spot when you get one or more of the ratio elements wrong, you can taste it immediately – something jars like a discordant note in a classical piano solo.
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