iNdustry NeWs

south AFricAN BrANdy NO straNGer tO WOrlD-BeatiNG QualitY

Local is lekker, and certainly, when it comes to brandy, local also means quality. In the same way that only sparkling wines from the Champagne region in France can be called as such, so can only brandy made in the Cognac wine growing region in the same country be called cognac. “However, South African pot still brandy is made in the same way as cognac, and is governed by even stricter production regulations. South African pot still brandies must be aged for at least three years in small French oak casks while cognacs have to be aged for a minimum of two-and-a-half years in casks which do not have a size specifi ed, said Caroline Snyman, Distell’s business director of Spirits. “This means that the quality of even South Africa’s entry-level products is at a high standard. And with brandy having being distilled in the Cape for over three hundred years, it goes without saying that our distillers have refi ned the art of producing exceptional brandies.”

Like producers in Cognac, South Africa’s brandy masters double distill a high quality wine in traditional copper pot stills. Besides the climate and the soils, the type of grape variety used to make the wine and resultant brandy can have a signifi cant infl uence on the ultimate style of the brandy. Producers in Cognac mainly use Ugni Blanc (for roundness), Colombar (for depth) and Folle blanche (for fi nesse), while in South Africa, the most commonly used grape varieties are Chenin blanc and Colombar. “We use these for their clean, fruit driven profi les. We are also starting to experiment with some red varieties.”

INTERNATIONAL SUCCESS AND FLAIR

South African brandy has a rapidly growing reputation for consistently exceptional quality, validated by the fact that South African brandies have taken the title of “Worldwide Best Brandy” no less than 11 times in 13 years at the highly prestigious International Wine and Spirit Competition in London. This honour has not been bestowed on just one or two producers but has gone to a number of producers proving that South Africa has a broad base of quality brandies coming out of the region. The image of brandy has begun to change, helped by musicians making mention of prominent brands in their lyrics. This shift began in 2001, when rap artist Busta Rhymes came out with his hit song, “Pass the Courvoisier.” The album’s cover featured the artist holding a brandy balloon, sky-rocketing sales of the brand almost 20% the following year. South African band Van Coke Cartel released a song called “I want brandy” in 2012. International brand ambassador Jamie Foxx is the current face of Oude Meester and local rapper Pro is aligned to Flight of the Fish Eagle. While Super premium brandies are best enjoyed neat with ice or a splash of water, brandy’s popularity as a base for cocktails is growing. It seems the general population has joined the music fraternity in their affi nity for the amber liquid. Popular cocktails include the Collison’s Cosmo, Klipdrift Gold Julep and the Oude Meester Franklin, with talented young mixologists constantly inventing delicious new drinks with brandy.

sA WiNe iNdustry Needs to Be competitive

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Alack of supply chain awareness is hampering the competitiveness of South Africa’s wine industry. However, an expert from the Stellenbosch University, Joubert van Eeden believes that with some changes made to the industry’s supply chains, SA wine will be able to compete far more effectively on the global market.

Van Eeden is a senior lecturer at Stellenbosch University’s Department of Logistics and he’s the author of the Wine Supply Chain Survey.

Supply chain management deals with getting the right product or service to the right place at the right time and cost, in order to satisfy customer needs.

He said a lot of money is spent on research related to growing grapes and making wine, but little if any research is being done into how best to get the wine from the cellar to the table.

“Many cellars are still thinking like fruit farmers who merely sell their produce to exporters. It’s a mindset that can – and must urgently change – if the SA wine industry is to be competitive,” says Van Eeden.

“Right now, increasing supply chain efficiency should also become a priority for struggling cellars to become more competitive in these tough economic times.

“Many cellars don’t recognise the existence of several supply chains – and most that are engaged in supply chain management are in the very early stages of supply chain maturity,” he says. According to Van Eeden, a lack of supply chain capability is the root cause of this lack of understanding. With this in mind, he has identified easy first steps for cellars to streamline their supply chains:

Understand the segments

The first step in streamlining your supply chain is to understand which segment of the market you’re serving, e.g. whether you’re dealing with bulk, basic or premium packaged wines and whether the target market is international or local. an appropriate strategy. For example, with bulk wine the focus should be on cost, but with premium packaged wine, reliability and responsiveness in terms of delivery become more important,” says Van Eeden.

Which channels?

Doing things the old way – because that’s how they’ve always been done – can spell doom for any business owner. “With an understanding of the demands of the target market, combined with an awareness of the various channels available to deliver product to them, wine cellars must next select the most innovative and appropriate option to suit their customers’ needs.

Obviously, common sense is critical when it comes to determining the delivery cost per unit that your business can afford. With a wine club, for example, the unit cost of delivery is likely higher, but the trade-off is that you’re probably dealing with premium wines and customers that are willing to pay a premium for delivery. However, in the retail environment, delivering less than a full truckload becomes very expensive.

is AFricA the druNkeN coNtiNeNt?

Image courtesy of One Red Eye An article published recently in time magazine website claimed: “Africa has a drinking problem”. Do Africans drink too much? Data shows that the drinking habits of Africa’s 55 countries are extremely varied. And the majority of Africans don’t drink at all. Researched by Kate Wilkinson

“Africa has a drinking problem”, a recent article by Time says, and “is in no shape to cope with an influx of alcohol”. Furthermore, it warned, “alcoholism is on the rise as beverage multinationals circle”. But how true is the claim that Africa has an alcohol problem and can it be applied to a continent of 55 countries with varied drinking patterns? A reader, Gcobani Qambela, asked the factchecking organisation Africa Check to investigate. The article cites the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) 2011 Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health. The WHO report looks at “global, regional and country consumption of alcohol, patterns of drinking, health consequences and policy responses”.

How much does Africa drink?

WHO measured per capita alcohol consumption in litres of pure alcohol and included people aged 15 years or older. This incorporated both regulated alcohol sales and “alcohol that is not taxed and is outside the usual system of governmental control”.

According to the WHO data, the world’s per capita alcohol consumption is 6.13 litres per year. Africa regions’ per capita alcohol consumption is only 0.02 litres higher at 6.15 litres a year. This is lower than Europe and the Americas, which consume 12.18 litres and 8.67 litres respectively. The regions that consume the least alcohol are Southeast Asia (2.2 litres) and the Eastern Mediterranean (0.65 litres).

Significantly, the WHO excludes seven African countries with large Muslim populations – Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Djibouti, Morocco, Somalia and Sudan – from the “African region” and categorises them as “Eastern Mediterranean”. In most of them, alcohol sales are either restricted or banned.

While WHO’s regional averages provide a unique guide to alcohol consumption rates, they provide little insight into the extremely varied drinking patterns of individual countries which are the focus of more detailed country profiles. The data is also several years old due to the time taken to collate it.

Kenya and South Africa’s drinking patterns

The central focus of the article is on Kenya and, to a much lesser extent, South Africa. Kenya, Time claims, is a country that is “consuming ever more alcohol”. South Africa is described as “one of the world’s heaviest drinking nations” despite the fact that WHO ranks South Africa in 55th place out of 189 countries. (Kenya lies at 118th. The heaviest drinking nation, according to the data, is Moldova followed by the Czech Republic.)

The article includes a quote from a Nairobi social worker. “Do we drink because we’re Kenyan or are we Kenyan because we drink? That is the question,” he asks. But the article fails to ask how much Kenyans and South Africans drink. Between 2003 and 2005, according to the 2011 WHO report, Kenya’s adult per capita alcohol consumption was 4.1 litres a year. In 2003, data showed that 74.4% of Kenyans were lifetime abstainers and 85.4% had not consumed alcohol in the last 12 months. A 2012 rapid situation assessment of the status of drug and substance abuse in Kenya found that 86.4% of the population reported that they did not consume alcohol.

Between 2003 and 2005 South Africa’s adult per capita alcohol consumption was 9.5 litres a year, according to the WHO report. Data from 2004 revealed that 65.2% of South Africans were lifetime abstainers and 72.9% had not consumed alcohol in the last 12 months.

A similar abstention rate of 72.3% was found in a 2011 study published in the African Journal of Psychiatry. The study used data from the 2008 South African National HIV, Incidence, Behaviour and Communication survey.

The 53 other countries in Africa

The remaining 53 African countries vary greatly in their consumption rates, according to WHO. Countries that have large Muslim populations tend to have low per capita alcohol consumption rates. Examples of these include Mali (1 litre per person per year on average), Comoros (0.4 litres), Guinea (0.8), Libya (0.11 litres), Egypt (0.37 litres), Mauritania (0.1 litres), Somalia (0.5 litres) and Algeria (1 litre). An article that looked at two of these countries and concluded that “Africans are teetotalers” would suffer from the same flaws as the Time article.

Higher up the spectrum you’ll find the Democratic Republic of the Congo (4.2 litres), Angola (5.4 litres) and Tanzania (6.8 litres). Uganda (11.9 litres) and Nigeria (12.3 litres) have Africa’s highest consumption rates. However, Nigeria’s consumption rate is only 0.01 litres higher than the WHO European regions’ average consumption rate. WHO defines heavy episodic drinking as consuming at least 60 grams or more of pure alcohol on at least one occasion weekly. Standard drink measures vary from country to country, but in South Africa a standard drink contains 12 grams of pure alcohol. Therefore, consuming five-and-a-half glasses of wine (at a typical 12% alcohol volume) or five 340ml beers (at a typical 5% alcohol volume) at least once a week would be considered “heavy episodic drinking”. The WHO Africa region has the highest prevalence of heavy episodic drinking. According to the WHO data, just over 25% of drinkers in the African countries it includes in the region can be classed as “heavy episodic drinkers”. However, WHO does not have information on the prevalence of such drinking in 20 African countries.

While the Time article reports that 25.1% of drinkers in the WHO Africa region drink too much, it fails to mention that the majority of people on the continent don’t drink at all, according to the WHO data. WHO estimated that in 2004, 57.3% of the Africa region were lifetime abstainers and 70.8% reported not consuming alcohol in a year. By comparison, only 18.9% of Europeans and 17.7% of the United States population were lifetime abstainers.

A snappy headline not supported by the data

Alcohol abuse can have detrimental effects on individuals and societies. A thorough understanding of the problem is a prerequisite to intervention. However, the claim that “Africa has a drinking problem” reveals less about Africa’s drinking habits than it does about Time’s perception of Africa. The “Dark Continent” has merely been renamed the “Drunk Continent”.

Drinking patterns vary greatly both within and across Africa’s 55 countries. While some African countries have high levels of consumption and binge-drinking, others have negligible consumption rates and high levels of abstention. By ignoring these important differences, the article perpetuates the perception that Africa is a homogenous continent.

“Africa’s drinking problem” may be a snappier headline than “Kenya and South Africa’s drinking problem” but the generalisation ignores a broad spectrum of drinking patterns and attitudes towards alcohol across the continent. – Africa Check.

Africa Check is a non-profit organisation which promotes accuracy in public debate – for more information visit more visit www.africacheck.org

and checklists. We also have continuity in our brewing team which has helped us to grow from year to year,” said tukkies WiNs iNtervArsity BreWiNG competitioN Carl Sandrock, University of Pretoria’s brewing team member and mentor.

Howard Benade, Edward Mills, David Wilson, Monique Schmidt, Jacques Teessen, John Cluett, Ben Lamaletie and Vimlan Monnsamy, Harald Golob, Carl Sandrock and Mike Heydenrych

over the top, had no major faults and the University of Pretoria was the overall winner of this year’s South African Brewery Intervarsity Beer Brewing Challenge. was perfectly to style,” said Chris Roth of Warthog Brewers, independent and accredited beer tasters. The University of Pretoria tested their The university’s Black Forest Lager claimed the Ben Lamaletie IBD Intervarsity Beer Brewing Challenge floating trophy, as well as the top honour of Castle Lager Best Bru Award , which carries a cash prize of R25 000, as well brewing skills against 10 other South Africa’s top universities, including University of the North West, University of the Free State, Rhodes University, UKZN Westville and Pietermaritzburg campus, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Cape Peninsular University of as the Carling Black Label Champion Technology, University of Stellenbosch, Lager with an additional cash prize of University of Limpopo and Wits R15 000. University. They beat 2012 defending champions, The University of Pretoria has proven the University of Cape Town, which was to be a winning team over much of this year presented with the award for the existence of the SAB Intervarsity Best Speciality Beer. Challenge, having brewed the best beer overall in 2008, 2010 and 2011. “The overall winning lager was very closely contested and the judges debated it for a while. The University of Pretoria’s Black Forest lager was the best balanced beer, which was not “We looked very specifically at the criteria used for judging. We brewed against these and focused on getting the process right, including quality control While the concept of the brewing challenge was started in 2003, the first official SAB Intervarsity Beer Brewing Challenge was initiated in 2006 as a means of encouraging beer appreciation among students and to introduce prospective SAB employees to the business.

“SAB actively works at encouraging a beer culture in South Africa by supporting the local craft brewing industry. Our Intervarsity Brewing Challenge helps us drive the growth of this important industry at a tertiary level, as well as provide opportunities for students to become part of business,” says SAB Technical Services Manager Vimlan Moonsamy.

Moonsamy said that competition had grown exponentially with this year having the most entries than any other year since it began six years ago. A total of 35 brews were received this year. He added that the quality of entries had also greatly improved.

Participating universities each have their own micro-breweries where students brew, ferment, condition and package their beers prior to the final stages of the competition when they are tasted by independent and accredited craft beer tasters. “An independent and experienced tasting panel is paramount in judging the high quality of the closely contested beers,” said Moonsamy.

Each style category has specific tasting guidelines as set by the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP). Most beer styles are not defined by a single beer and many styles are broad, encompassing multiple stylistically accurate variants.

WosA AppoiNts

NeW ceo

Wines of South Africa (WOSA) has appointed a new CEO, Siobhan Thompson, who succeeded Su Birch after 13 years at the helm of the organisation. Thompson has been Distell’s Global Head of Marketing for Amarula and the company’s other liqueur brands since 2010. Under her leadership, Amarula has been consistently ranked as one of the world’s fastest-growing liqueurs by international drinks research analysts. Her involvement with the brand, however, goes back many years, during which she aggressively built its global footprint, entrenching its presence in a range of developed and emerging economies.

She was previously Distell’s Group General Marketing Manager for brandies and cognac, including Bisquit. She also worked for several years marketing the company’s sparkling wines and was responsible for the launch of the luxury Pongracz Desiderius Cap Classique. Before joining Distell in 2001, she was responsible for the UCT Graduate School of Business marketing and public relations. Her extensive experience includes marketing fast-moving consumer goods, as well as cosmetics. She began her working career in market research, first for Research Surveys and then Nielsens. She holds a B Tech in Marketing and has completed the Manchester Business School’s Advanced Marketing Strategy programme. WOSA chairman Johann Krige said the organisation was looking forward to

The newly appointed CEO of WOSA, Siobhan Thompson

having someone of Thompson’s global marketing calibre and experience at the helm to further the significant contribution made by Birch. “She is a highly respected, resultsorientated, marketing professional. Her seasoned exposure to traditional and developing markets and her conversancy with the alcohol category inspire great confidence. We look forward to her leadership in taking South African wine to the next exciting phase of its development in the international arena, ”Krige added.