By banning the transport of alcohol, those regulations have meant that, in practice, there’s no way for wine to move from a winery directly to a consumer anywhere in the country, or from an inland winery to a port at the coast.
Since then, the ban on exports has been lifted, which is good news in a country that typically exports up to half of its wine production. However, the sale of wine in the local market is still not allowed under the phased approach to deconfinement; the phased approach continues to include restrictions on channels such as ecommerce and the extended closure of winery tasting rooms.
Two direct impacts of these ongoing restrictions on domestic sales are that cash flow will continue to be a serious problem, and workers in the vineyard and on winery hospitality teams will face severely limited or non-existent employment.
The problem is particularly acute for contract or seasonal workers who are not permanently employed by the wine farms, according to viticulturalist and vineyard consultant Rosa Kruger, who herself has not been back in the vineyards since the lockdown started on March 27. Kruger said that many of those workers, who do most of the work on the wine or grape farms in South Africa, are a member of a bigger family of six to ten people where only one person actually earns a living. Now even that person isn’t earning money.
Vineyards and wineries, including tasting rooms and overnight accommodations, are either empty or are operating with a bare skeleton crew. If you could imagine a “domino effect” of the emptiness of that work flow, one phase that’s visibly impacted is the way that workers travel from home to their job and back again.
“Owners here have been very cautious of transporting teams of people sitting closely together in trucks or buses or working in close proximity to each other,” Kruger said. “Most work has been halted and still is.”
“Covid-19 came as a shock to the farm worker community, especially those that work in the vineyards,” said Leigh Diedericks, who has worked for L’Avenir wine estates for twenty years. The Stellenbosch-based business also includes a country lodge, and Diedericks’ concern extends to workers involved in the tourism and hospitality sectors as well.
“For those involved in restaurants, hospitality and wine tasting, this is a big concern for all of us,” he said, “because it is part of the wine economy... Many people, including those at L’Avenir, were worried about how we are going to feed our children and put food on the table.”
For L’Avenir, that’s meant “back to basic” needs, which includes continuing to pay worker salaries and also organizing food distribution.
Food Distribution and Necessities
On that point, a resource that’s mentioned often is the Pebbles Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting and educating the children and families of South Africa’s farming communities. For Carolyn Martin of Creation Wines in Hermanus, working with Pebbles has meant fixing their garden and planting food that will go toward relief efforts; others give staples such as eggs and onions.
Martin and her team are also involved in organizing funding efforts, which she says includes nappies for babies and critical relief packs that enable families of four to survive for a week with all the right nutritional ingredients. The team has managed to secure supplies directly from the manufacturers at factory prices or even less. Her IT team have also worked with NGOs, churches, disaster management teams and community government to develop maps that show how many critical relief packs have been dropped at which locations.
“People have come together,” Martin said. “We asked [the workers] specifically what they wanted, and took them that.”
Communicating frequently is a top priority, along with gathering feedback on a daily basis. “I didn’t realize the difference that [connecting so often] would make in our lives,” Martin said. “We learned a whole lot of amazing new things about working together that we never imagined. For me what’s really important is we get through this, save the business, and get everybody back.”
