Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/62409
GRAPE GRO WING Worker involvement improves terroir Q uite apart from enthusing about his innovative approach to harvesting grapes, mark Solms is so passionately articulate about the need for social and worker-relationship changes in post-apartheid South Africa that his comments time and again veer sharply from rachis strangulation to these much broader concerns. The shift in subject is not as "We now all have a vested interest jarring as it may first appear: apartheid and South African viticulture entangled one another for many decades, since the wine industry was built first on slavery and then on cheap black labor. During the period of trade sanctions, the government con- trolled production with no concern about competing in world markets and no incentive for making improvements. Vast hectares of marginally drinkable Chenin Blanc blanketed in making this thing work." —Mark Solms, Solms-Delta Wine Estate the Cape Winelands. Freedom from the strictures of apartheid in the early 1990s was paralleled by freedom for winery owners to break loose from governmental control—finally rescinded—and to achieve wine quality and varietal goals never before attempted in the country. Solms grew up in South Africa, but he abandoned that country for England as a young man when he and many other Caucasians found apartheid too oppressive to toler- ate. He expected to live out his life thousands of miles from the wine farm that had been in his family for centuries, but when nelson mandela was finally released from prison after 28 years, apartheid abolished and non-racial elections held in 1994 for the first time in history, Solms decided he could again proudly embrace the country of his origins. Solms rescued the family winery from bankruptcy and resurrected and refurbished its equipment and facilities. With his newfound free- dom of choice he planted acres of Rhone varieties and created a program to offer the black vineyard and winery workers, descendents of slaves who toiled on these Cape Winelands area farms in the 19th QSEE US AT UNIFIED, BOOTH #743 106 Wines & Vines JAnUARY 2012 QSEE US AT UNIFIED, BOOTH #F2