South Africa’s wine farmers face their third challenging year

It hasn’t been an easy two years for South Africa’s wine farmers, and the current crop is also unpromising.

According to wine industry body Vinpro, South African wine farmers are expecting their fourth-smallest crop in 17 years. Rain, subsequent diseases and the large-scale uprooting of vines in the Northern Cape all contributed to this sour situation.

Charl du Plessis, CEO of South Africa’s second-largest cellar, Orange River Cellars (ORC), tells the FM vine farmers are entering their third tough year. “Farmers are getting moedeloos [despondent].”

Unusual weather brought early summer rainfall to the Western and Northern Cape. Sporadic hailstorms cut through vineyards in Paarl, Worcester and Robertson during the second week of December, according to Vinpro.

In the Northern Cape, farmers along the Orange River had up to 60 days of rain last year compared with a long-term average of between eight and 12 days a year, according to Du Plessis. “In addition, the Orange River was in flood and we had to endure high levels of humidity at the end of last year,” he says. “The humidity brought on disease.”

As Vinpro states, powdery mildew infections were widespread at the end of last year, from the Northern Cape and Olifants River Valley to the Cape south coast and Swartland. All because of unseasonably high rainfall.

The rain and disease followed two tough years after Covid and the South African government’s haphazard way of dealing with it, which included banning the sale of alcohol for prolonged periods in 2020. Some cellars, such as ORC, still experience the pain this caused.

“We lost 30% of our turnover in those two years,” says Du Plessis. “We sell wine to the lower-income segment of the market through so-called bag-in-box wines.” This led to an oversupply in 2021 and 2022, followed by the missed harvest of 2022. The impact is staggering.

“We usually process about 40Ml of wine a year,” says Du Plessis. “Last year, we processed only 12.5Ml .” As disease ripped through the Orange River crop last year, many vines just didn’t survive. “Powdery mildew killed the engines of the plants.”

That forced the cellar to switch from wine production to producing grape juice concentrate, which attracts lower market prices. “The income [from concentrate] is half that of wine,” he says. In fact, average wine grape prices dropped from about R1,900 a ton to its present R1,000 a ton. No wonder then that farmers have been uprooting vineyards in the Northern Cape.

“Over the past four to five years, 280ha of wine grapes have been uprooted,” says Du Plessis. “We are now at 1,860ha along the Orange River.”

According to Vinpro, most of the uprooting occurred in Northern Cape vineyards.

But the rain wasn’t bad news for all wine producers. As Heinrich Coetzee, chief winemaker at Ashton Winery, tells the FM: “At most it rained 70mm at one time. It was a blessing in disguise during a dry spell.”

Coetzee says Ashton Winery is ramping up production this week. Though it’s too early to determine the extent of the smaller crop, the intake of grapes is about 9% lower than the same period last year. “But we’ll only be certain in about two weeks’ time. We haven’t taken in enough grapes from different cultivars yet to make a final call.”

Eskom’s rolling power cuts have had a tangible impact on production. “Producers couldn’t get through their irrigation schedules,” he says. “And we’ve seen it in the early deliveries of grapes. There isn’t the normal juiciness in the grapes.”

This may, as a slight silver lining, help with the quality of red wine colour extraction in due course, he says.

Though a smaller crop is expected in the Western Cape too, Coetzee remains optimistic. “Hopefully it will get better as the season progresses.”

On the other hand Josef Dreyer, from Raka Wines in the Overberg, expects a normal crop this year. The winery, which sells 98% of its produce locally, will start a week-and-a-half later than in other years. “Our grapes look healthy,” he says.

As with the Ashton producers up north, Dreyer is concerned about power cuts. “I’m more worried about electricity than the quality of the crop this year,” he tells the FM. “Where we normally pump water outside Eskom’s expensive peak hours, we must now irrigate whenever we have power — including during peak hours.”