Innovation, education and empowering the South African wine industry
The past decade has been one of the most transformative in wine.co.za's 30-year journey. From launching educational platforms and training many tasting room professionals to pioneering new digital tools and e-commerce solutions, we've continued to evolve with the needs of the industry while staying true to our mission: helping South African wineries to sell more wine.
Focus on education
Education has always been one of our greatest passions. Whether helping consumers discover South African wine or equipping tasting room staff with practical sales skills, we've continually invested in learning.
One silver lining of our terrible Covid years was the discovery of the Wine Wise ebook, devised by British Master of Wine Cassidy Dart and graphic designer Inneke Minnie, also an avid wine lover. Between them, they produced this beautiful ebook on South African wine. Cassidy had been stuck here during Covid and whiled away his time in Hout Bay creating the content, focusing on the main varieties of South African wine. They had great ambitions of raising funds for educational projects through the sale of wines, having launched a wine brand, Kunye Wines, for this purpose.
They also managed to translate the book into isiXhosa, and it was the first wine book to have done so. We were delighted to partner with them and thus developed our Learn environment on wine.co.za. All our educational wine videos are available there.
I also tried my hand (again) at video production. I worked with Roxan Waldeck and Siya Mbaba (and our gorgeous cat Chillibyte) to create interesting and fun educational videos on wine. Clearly I am not a movie director, but we had fun!
2022: tastewine.co.za and Vino Noir videos
We created the 3rd iteration of our wine e-commerce platform, tastewine.co.za, marking our first shift from custom-built e-commerce to a modern, off-the-shelf Shopify storefront.
To make wine exploration accessible and fun, we curated theme-based Taste Packs designed around varieties ("Taste of Pinotage", "Taste of Sauvignon Blanc", etc.) and iconic terroirs ("Taste of Stellenbosch", "Taste of Robertson", etc.). To bring these packs to life, we collaborated with Qhama and Thulani Xhali of Vino Noir, who produced vibrant, engaging videos guiding wine lovers through each selection.
Explore the full collection in our Learn video series, starting with the video below on South Africa's signature variety, Pinotage!
Qhama and Thulani Xhali of Vino Noir
Each pack was shipped out in our new, custom-designed black wine.co.za boxes. We think they are really cool – thanks to the man with the eye for design, our art director and web developer Garth Hapgood-Strickland.
2022: WWF Conservation Champions collaboration
It is always a pleasure to work with one's children (well, it is for me), and so I really enjoyed the WWF Conservation Champions project with my daughter Leila. We set out to create a series of videos highlighting the wineries who are committed to environmental conservation, sustainability, and transformation, and have reached champion status.
We traveled throughout the Western Cape and visited wine farms such as Delheim, Bosman Hermanus, Gabriëlskloof, Paul Clüver Family Wine Estate, and also Cederberg Cellar, where we connected with the inimitable David Nieuwoudt and the vineyards with high altitude and zero disease.
See all the videos we produced on our WWF Conservation Champions spotlight page.
Sommelier & Education partners - and Best Sommelier of South Africa 2023
We have always supported and been a media partner to the South African Sommeliers Academy, and I have attended many Best Somm competitions. It was really wonderful to see the hard-working and passionate Jean Vincent Ridon achieve his goal of Best South African Sommelier in 2023. The following year saw the talented George Young win the Best Young South African Sommelier in 2024.
We also were pleased to have developed branded wine cooler bags and wine waiter's friends which have been used for prizes at these competitions as well as the Ubuntu Wine Challenges, Interhotel Challenge, PYDA Graduation and more.
2023: Launched the wine.co.za DTC Academy
After a short stint by Xania van der Merwe with us running Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) focused online workshops and the Vintelligence reports, we joined forces with Neil Tabraham, partner in the Sommeliers Academy (alongside Jean-Vincent Ridon), bringing deep expertise across wine education, sommelierie, logistics, and training in-house to tasting rooms.
As global wine consumption dips, DTC sales and engagement from tasting rooms remain the most sustainable engine for winery profitability. To capitalise on the Western Cape’s booming wine tourism, we developed custom, on-site training programs focused on wine knowledge, guest engagement, service, and sales. To date, we have awarded 171 certificates to over 130 graduates across regions spanning from Stellenbosch and Franschhoek to Breedekloof and George.
Our commitment to transformation remains central to this mission. Thanks to funding from South Africa Wine in 2025, we delivered our Wine Sales Advisor course to 30 Pinotage Youth Development Academy (PYDA) alumni.
Additionally, we crafted and launched a dedicated Wine Service Essentials course for 15 young adults through the Pebbles Project Youth Development Programme, providing them with hands-on exposure and a stepping stone into the wine tourism industry, and we are very pleased to be continuing with this training in 2026.
The 2025 PYDA Alumni - DTC Academy Level 3 graduates
New extended Services pages launched
With our foray into using Wordpress more extensively, we launched our new Services pages, making it really easy for potential clients to see what we do. We have always focused on making a difference wherever we are, and launched our What We Care About page too.
We even have valuable video testimonials - see more HERE
2024/2025: Introduced Tokens
To make media publishing accessible and affordable for every winery, we introduced our Pay-as-you-go Token system. Available individually or in bundles of 5 and 10, Tokens give brands complete budget control to publish news, launch vintages, celebrate awards, or promote events whenever needed.
We’ve seen fantastic adoption, especially for news releases, proving it to be the most flexible way to secure guaranteed publication and extended audience reach.
With 22% of our content served being wine fact sheets, we are encouraging more boutique and emerging wineries to leverage Tokens to publish theirs.
As the de facto "source of truth" for South African wine, wine.co.za ensures that published wine fact sheets are archived and indexed, giving trade buyers, sommeliers, and journalists instant, reliable access to essential technical data, stories, awards, harvesting details, and more. We have some fact sheets going back nearly 30 years!
See, for example, the Kleine Zalze Family Reserve Sauvignon Blanc 2024 and its extensive archive.
2025: Stats dashboard launched
In a move to reduce emails and make information more immediately accessible to our winery clients, we introduced an online dashboard, giving our listing clients 24/7 access to see how well their content is doing. It details the number of views for each piece of content published, as well as showing the exposure stats for each Gold Listing. It helps wineries to see which wines are visible on wine.co.za and also displays a great graph of the content viewed.
2025/2026: Integrated web solutions launched
We have always worked towards making the wineries' lives easier and simpler. To this end, we developed a WordPress service, which means wineries get a fully customisable website, with zero headaches, as we do all the updates as part of their annual listing with us. We have become an extension of their marketing division, which for many farms is one person! All it takes is one instruction to our team, and both wine.co.za and the winery's websites are updated dynamically. Never worry about another event being old on your website – it does not happen with us!
We are very pleased to showcase two of these new websites this year: Groote Post and Meerlust's websites.
Lessons learnt - Guest Wifi & Wine Whisperers
You cannot run a business for 30 years without experiencing a few misses, and I truly believe those lessons are what keep a company moving forward. And sometimes it is that the world is not ready for that particular service.
One challenge we tackled was helping wineries capture visitor data. Our Guest WiFi system offered free internet access while enabling wineries to grow their direct-to-consumer databases. Although the concept delivered clear value, adoption never reached the scale we had hoped for, reminding us that even good ideas need the right timing.
Then came the era of digital content creators. We launched Wine Whisperers, giving influencers custom online storefronts to feature their personal wine clubs. We brought on some fantastic creators and ran it for over a year, only to uncover a fundamental industry truth: high social media engagement does not automatically equal wine sales!
While we attracted some fantastic partners and ran the platform for a year, and didn't quite achieve the commercial breakout we envisioned, it was a fascinating experiment in digital retail.
A big hats off goes to financial expert Johann Biermann, whose store, Wines I Like by Johann Biermann, emerged as our top performer and proved that clear curation and trust truly resonate with buyers.
Sales Accelerator
While many wineries invest in an online storefront, few maintain consistent communication with their digital customer base, leaving significant DTC revenue on the table. To bridge this gap, we launched our Sales Accelerator service in 2025. Working directly with our CellarDirect wineries, we design and manage targeted email campaigns with clear, compelling calls to action, turning tasting room visitors and web traffic into repeat online buyers.
Moving offices
The world of wine has changed a lot, and in the past we needed to keep a lot of stock, and we also needed a lot more staff. With the advent of Covid-19, more people work from home, and our online store no longer keeps stock, so we downsized to a lovely little office in the same complex, now no 8 Kingfisher Park, Somerset West, in June 2025.
30 years of connection
Thirty years on, our mission remains unchanged: connecting people with South African wine and helping the industry thrive. While technology, consumer behaviour and the wine landscape continue to evolve, our commitment to innovation, education and meaningful partnerships has never been stronger. The best chapters of the wine.co.za story are still to come.
We would not be where we are without the support of our many friends, our clients, the industry, and, of course, our wonderful team. A huge thank you to all!
For more on wine.co.za and our 30 years, click HERE. Keep an eye on our 30th Birthday Spotlight for more stories.
Let the countdown begin! This article is the sixth in our Countdown series – one per month till August, when we finally celebrate our 30th birthday.