South Africa has spent decades perfecting the craft of wine, but the harder question is whether it is building businesses capable of sustaining that excellence in an increasingly complex market.
Deep roots, shallow reach
Climate variability, water scarcity and environmental pressure now require a different kind of thinking, not just optimisation, but anticipation and the ability to manage risk before it becomes a crisis. As Carlos Poblete-Echeverría, Associate Professor in Digital Viticulture at Stellenbosch University and coordinator of the Digital Agriculture Research Group at SAGWRI explains, the shift towards systems-thinking and decision making under uncertainty is redefining the skillset the next generation will need.
Digital viticulture has already changed what happens in the vineyard. Sensors, modelling systems and real-time monitoring tools have moved decision-making from reactive to predictive, and graduates are no longer just learning what to do but why certain decisions succeed or fail under specific conditions without having to ‘wait and see’ in the vineyard.
Technical mastery only takes you so far. A viticulturist may enter the industry with deep knowledge of plant science, soils and environmental responses, but their role quickly expands beyond the vine. Managing budgets, evaluating infrastructure investments and understanding return on investment in an industry where margins are under sustained pressure becomes the day-to-day reality. Most wine education does not prepare people for it.
Well served in some places. Under-served in others.
South Africa has no shortage of pathways into the wine industry. Stellenbosch, Elsenburg, the Cape Wine Academy and institutions offering WSET qualifications have built a strong foundation of technical and professional education. Institutions like the International Wine Education Centre have expanded access to globally recognised qualifications, creating greater international alignment and opening new doors for South African professionals abroad.
According to IWEC founder Cathy Marston, wine education is increasingly pursued not only for local industry participation, but as a pathway into global wine careers. Growing South African representation in international curricula is helping to build awareness and demand for local wine on the world stage, making the domestic commercial gap all the more striking.
The fact that UCT's Graduate School of Business describes its Business of Wine short course as South Africa's ‘only specialised programme focused on the commercial side of the industry’ is telling. Covering wine tourism, strategic marketing, finance, international trade and value creation, the curriculum acknowledges that wine is both an agricultural and a commercial product and that long-term success requires fluency in both worlds.
Narrative-building remains one of the least formally taught skills in winemaking education. Students learn to maximise quality, but do not always learn how quality translates into value in a consumer's mind.
The curriculum nobody wrote
Jonathan Steyn, convenor of the Wine Business Management and Hospitality Leadership programme at UCT GSB, has spent years examining the disconnect between technical excellence and commercial reality. The programme's three-month bootcamp structure was built around a practical constraint: most wine businesses are SMEs that cannot afford to pull people out of operations for a full academic year.
‘The main focus was to teach people critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, and, really importantly, cognitive agility,’ Steyn explains. He defines cognitive agility as the ability to take a range of concepts and combine them into something greater than the sum of their parts. In a market defined by volatility and rapid change, that may be the industry's most undervalued capability.
This does not mean every winemaker needs to become a marketer. Specialisation works and, in many successful wine businesses, the division of labour functions well. What matters is whether the winemaker has enough commercial literacy to understand how their decisions land in the market and to collaborate meaningfully with the people who shape a wine's success.
Breaking the silos
‘Winemakers will very rarely have a conversation with the marketing team or with the finance team. You have the siloing of information, and if you have a siloing of information, it stops innovation,’ says Steyn. In wine, where brand, product and perception are so deeply intertwined, the consequences are particularly costly. Consumers do not experience wine in silos. They experience a brand story, and when the people responsible for different parts of that story are not talking to each other, it shows.
In the UCT programme, this is addressed directly. Sommeliers, winemakers, marketers and journalists are grouped together and tasked with developing a single product and speaking with one voice. Steyn calls it collaborative innovation and is honest about the friction it creates. Without structured frameworks for values alignment and conflict resolution, group tension derails projects before they begin.
He also pushes back on one of the industry's most persistent assumptions: that meaningful innovation requires a breakthrough moment. Drawing on Japanese manufacturing, where businesses implement hundreds of small incremental improvements daily, he argues that the compounding of small, evidence-based adaptations consistently outperforms the hunt for a single defining idea.
Where industry must lead
Academic institutions are evolving, but rarely as fast as the market demands, and closing this gap cannot rest solely with universities. Distributors, marketers and brand builders occupy a unique position between production and consumer, and the best of them are beginning to take that responsibility seriously.
Vinimark's monthly masterclasses are one example of what more integrated industry learning can look like, bringing together winemakers, viticulturists and marketers around topics grounded in commercial reality. A recent session led by Vinimark's Wine Training and Education Manager, Ginette de Fleuriot, titled "Tell Your Story", explored how narrative shapes consumer perception and purchasing behaviour, precisely the kind of thinking still missing from most winemaking curricula.
Champagne, Napa and Tuscany did not build their global reputations on product quality alone. They built ecosystems of value, narrative and positioning, and they did so deliberately. South Africa has the product. The question is whether it has the commercial ambition to match.
The next vintage of wine leaders
The demands on the next generation will only intensify. Success will not be defined by technical knowledge alone, particularly in a world where information is increasingly accessible to everyone. It will depend on critical thinking, adaptability and the ability to integrate data, experience and commercial understanding into decisions that actually move a business forward.
Craft or commerce is not a choice. They are both ingredients in the final product, and the producers who treat them as inseparable will define what this industry becomes.