Over the years, I have read a lot of periodical analyses and critiques about how the South African wine industry is not doing enough when it comes to helping the disadvantaged communities it relies so heavily upon to operate as a successful industry. Some of it may be fact, some of it fiction, but whenever I am spending longer periods of time in the Cape winelands, I am always curious and enquiring as to what specific projects are successfully operating in the winelands and making a real impact on real peoples’ lives.
On my recent trip to the Cape, I managed to not only spend a week in Stellenbosch judging but also spent an extended time in both Franschhoek and Hemel-en-Aarde. Knowing full well that my time in and around Hermanus would be pulled in a number of directions, I contacted Carolyn Martin of Creation and enquired if there would be any opportunity to do a charity wine dinner for consumers to help raise funds for a local charity.
Carolyn, being the indomitable force that she is, thought it would be a great idea to get some of the local wineries involved in a fine wine dinner to help raise funds for their local branch of Pebbles Project, a charity I had encountered many times before through the very generous fundraising work of ex-Mullineux Wines shareholder Keith Prothero in London, as well as during my time as the Cape Wine Auction’s UK Charity Ambassador, Pebbles Project being a significant beneficiary of the funds raised annually.
Wine farms and social impact
To be honest, I primarily thought that the Pebbles Project was mostly active in and around Stellenbosch but was pleasantly surprised to see how its incredible network had grown to cover great swathes of the Cape’s winelands. The Pebbles Project is a South African non-profit founded in 2004 that works to improve the lives of children and families in the country’s agricultural communities, many of whom are the sons, daughters, and relatives of wine farm workers.
Operating across Somerset West, Stellenbosch, Paarl, Wellington, Citrusdal, and the Hemel-en-Aarde region near Hermanus, Pebbles, as I learnt, currently supports over 1,400 children between the ages of 0 and 18, alongside their families. Its work follows a five-pillar approach covering education, health, nutrition, community development, and child protection through social work programmes, addressing challenges such as poverty, alcohol abuse, and limited access to basic services that are common in farming communities.
As it turns out, one of the organisation’s most notable initiatives happens to be in the Hemel-en-Aarde outside Hermanus. In 2015, Carolyn Martin, co-owner of Creation Wines, approached the Pebbles Project to develop educational facilities for farming families in the Valley. A local farm owner made available a 10-hectare piece of land, and seed funding from the Cape Wine Auction Trust enabled the opening of an Early Childhood Development and After-School Club centre in 2016.
The project has since grown substantially: a Rotary Global grant in 2019 funded two additional classrooms, and by 2020 the centre had grown from 62 to 113 learners.
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