Life has changed drastically for me in the last three years, and if I’m trying to avoid the seduction of Calypso’s Island, I must assume that we’re all feeling the shift in tide. AI has become an ordinary thing; no longer a concept linked to a flying-car future, but a usable, accessible and relevant tool in our day-to-day lives. People’s relationships with work have changed: time and location flexibility are prioritised. Social media has morphed into a market place for algorithm-driven advertising. Wellness has become mainstream, and the cosmic YAWN of weaponised voyeurism on social platforms has frankly made self-improvement an embarrassingly cringy endeavour to behold.
Drinking culture has subsequently evolved. Consumers, on a paradoxically increasing level, have decreased the frequency of their alcohol consumption. The 'feel the grass between your toes'-Birkenstock brigade are now spending premium-cocktail money on equally grassy matcha and iced tea with fruit flavoured globs of plant mucous floating around in them. Alcohol-free beer has come a long way, but de-alcoholised wine still feels like it has a way to go to match the flavour properties we all know and love from its more grown-up, alcohol-rich cousin. The few sane individuals left, still clutching to the life force of our social lubricants (alcohol), aren’t drinking as much as they used to, but are trading quantity for quality. "I drink less, but I drink better," is what they’re saying. Personally, drinking better often leads to drinking more, but that’s probably just a me problem.
The retail round robin
For the majority of my time spent in this perpetually (seemingly) struggling industry, I stood in retail stores, pretending to know how to do admin, unpacking and repacking shelves, and helping people choose wines for dinner parties, anniversaries and the occasional midweek crisis. The wines were wrapped, packed, and stacked, then sent home with their respective new owners.
Retail taught me many things, especially the high-end retail I was working in. To an extent, I think these business are at the forefront of wine industry struggle. From pricing wars to allocation wine negotiations. The business of wine is a cut-throat place where event schedules are dictated by when winemakers make their way from the Cape to Joburg; and, for the most part, identical events are scheduled for the Wednesday and Thursday night indulgences of the Jozi wine crowd.
We’d invite our clients to taste new releases, chat to the winemakers, and send them home, order sheets filled in, and payments taken. Event after event. Release after release. The things that set you apart in this rat race is the size of your allocations of special wines, and the pocket depth of your client base.
Looking back, both Dry Dock Liquors and Wine Menu provided me with unique working experiences as well as retail insights. Dry Dock asked me to justify my curious palate through converting my enthusiasm for certain wines into sales. The relative freedom I had in the buying department forced me to develop my palate very quickly, too. It forced me to learn my clients' palates as well. When business was slow, constructing salivating tasting notes in an attempt to coax thirst from the throats of our clients was the name of the game. In part, this is how the unashamed smut that is Virgin Vines was founded.
Wine Menu asked me to develop a new set of skills. Whereas the clientele at Dry Dock were curious consumers, happy to try weird and wonderful things in pursuit of building their palates, the typical consumer at Wine Menu seemed to have taken that journey already. A client base of developed palates, and budgets that didn’t really ask how the wine tasted, but had increasing concern for provenance, rarity and collectability. Here, tasting wines in search of quality, instead of sexy tasting notes, became my main focus.
While I tasted less wine at Wine Menu than I did at Dry Dock, it seemed the magic of the business was how it attracted the best wines in the country, both discovered and yet to be discovered. Despite the more selective tasting schedule, the shelves were never lacking in incredibly special wine.
Having said this, I must add that a rising struggle facing the retail sector is not the fierce competition from other retailers, but the margin hunt that sees the farms surface into the direct-to-consumer (DtC) marketplace.
It seems that farms are building a direct line to the end user and capitalising on the increased profit margin of taking their wines to the retail market. The wine allocation game, for retail, is tumbling. Increasing volumes and variety of special wines does not mean more sales, unfortunately. Especially when clients are opting to buy direct from the farms instead of supporting their local retailers. No one is at fault here. Business is business, and everyone wants to maximise profit. But if the farms and producers aren’t careful, they will alienate the retailers that made their brands visible in the market in the first place.
In service: Open Bottle
Today I stand behind the bar, not for the first time (I have drunkenly pushed my way to the service side of the bar at Mr Pants like many of Joburg’s wine industry), but for the first time in this capacity.
It’s incredibly exciting to start something from scratch. A blank slate to make my mark. A space where no one really knows what to expect. And ironically enough, coming from the person at the forefront, neither do I. I know that my DtC offering is more DtC than it's ever been. Not only is my marketplace directed at the end user, but my recommendations and decisions regarding my menu are being reviewed right in front of me, and not from a safe distance.
My initial fear was that my taste and the preferences that guided the construction of my wine list would not be received well. A week before opening, and the relentless week that followed, was spent tossing and turning in bed. Nightmares of people spitting wine at my face in disgust. Disgruntled customers hurling abuse to the sky and, inevitably, tearing the very thin veil of my self-confidence that had been very heavily protected by the time and distance between recommendation and then subsequent consumption of any given bottle. I didn’t have that time and space anymore. The moment of service would be live.
By the time you read this, we would have been open for a month. Several cases of wine have been poured, a glass or two have been broken. A nervous breakdown has happened in the back of house when I realised the there was red wine in the white wine fridge. But when all is said and done, there is a new wine bar in Joburg. A wine bar with a set menu of (what I think) is an interesting and brave (not my words) list of wines, and an ever growing blackboard of special things being poured by the glass.
By the glass
The wine industry is often criticised (internally) for its propensity to gate-keep the rare, usually single vineyard wines that receive all the accolades from figures like Tim Atkin, Jancis Robinson and the like. It seems whenever a Master of Wine scores a wine over 95 points, the wine is suddenly rarer than rocking horse s***.
So, you’re left with having to sell a kidney or two to be able to afford them on the secondary market. And that’s IF you can find the wine on the secondary market, because sometimes even that is impossible. In a lot of cases, consumers end up having to wait for the next vintage to be released, not before they assume the position for the producer/distributor/retailer and indulge in much posterior pecks and invitational bending over before being “allowed” a small allocation of their wine.
The result is that these wines are still inaccessible, even if you’re willing to fork out your least favourite child to buy them.
I too have critiqued the industry for making these wines so illusive in the past, because it’s a shame that we all don’t at least get a chance to taste them as consumers. And for the first time in my career, I get to do something about it.
My blackboard wine list is built on these types of wines. The wines that only live in myth for most people is available as a by the glass offering behind my bar. From Alheit to Rall to Porseleinberg to Sadie. These wines will be opened, they will be poured, and they will be shared with anyone who is interested in them. And for me, that is a far greater service to the industry than hiding the near perfection that South Africa produces in some private cellar (that will probably be auctioned off as a dead estate in the next 20 years). Great wine is meant to be shared and consumed, not coveted.
My first pours
Life in service, while far more physically and mentally taxing, has been infinitely more rewarding. I got into this industry for the people, and the stories that they come with, and now I get to engage in real time. I’ve traded case sales for by the glass offerings, and it all feels more intentional, more human, more fulfilling for me.
I feel I now have the platform to take all the opinions I have shared in the last two years to market. While the wine offering of the bar will always be incredibly important, it is the philosophy of the bar that will be pivotal in how we carve ourselves into the landscape. That philosophy is very simple: To build curiosity and understanding of wine into our client base, while making great wine accessible to all those who want to sample some of the best wine this country has to offer.