Cape Talk

Wines you've tasted, and there were a good many of those. This sentence caught my eye: South African wines and grapes are too cheap for their own good. Tell us more about why you say that and what the implications of that are. Yeah, I think it's a problem, really, that it affects the whole value chain. That I think that the price that growers are getting for their grapes is too cheap. Most of the wines that are in the marketplace, both in South Africa and overseas, are too cheap for the industry to be sustainable, I would say, in its current form. And I think.

As I said, this affects everybody in the value chain from the people who pick the grapes right up to the people who import the wines. But the biggest impact it's having is on the vineyards and also on the profitability of wineries. So it's a kind of a paradox, really, that the greatest moment in its history, really, in terms of the quality of South African wine, that the price is still too cheap. It's very difficult to argue that as a consumer or a consumer journalist, even because people say, what's wrong with cheap wine? We love cheap wine. I think that's true. We all like a bargain, don't we? But I think the problem is that it's not really.

Sustainable for the industry and particularly for agriculture in this country. Tim, I mentioned at the start, this is special report South Africa or South Africa special report rather number 14. I mean, if you look and we don't need to trace a full 14 years, but if you look at where South African wine was, where we started and where we are now, I mean, how would you locate us in terms of a competitive but also shrinking global market?