Shipping the surplus to the neighbours 10 June 2008

Bulk wine exports at their bulkiest leave Cape Town

It is a picture to kill off any romantic thought about wine, but then, of course, one needs to be practical: large shiny bulk tanker trucks lined up one after the other  (32 of them to be precise) at the dockside. They are waiting to be connected with the hoses of the giant tanker ship, the Nazo-S. The juice being so vigorously pumped over: the ‘surplus’ from the Cape’s wine cellars, to be shipped in bulk up the coast to our neighbours in Angola.

Naspers’s business supplement carried the picture this week of the bright-red-decked Turkish-registered ‘chemical tanker’ in the Cape Town docks and the feeding pipes which were filling up its stainless steel tank with three million litres of red Cape wine. The price per litre is not given but is unlikely to be substantial

The newspaper reports that 20 million litres had been dispatched over the past year in ten trips up the coast, where South Africa’s left-over red is replacing what used to be mostly Portuguese and Spanish wine. The report says this is wine that would normally be distilled, but is packed in cartons in Angola and sold to retailers.

It takes 45 hours to pump three million litres into the ship and two to three days to remove after a few days sea journey, which makes it a cheaper deal for Angola than bringing the stuff from Europe.

The deal is handled by local company Global Pact and facilitated by the Ciatti group. A spokesperson for the latter is quoted as saying that this is not wine that would normally be consumed in South Africa. It is tasted by a panel and permits are issued by the Department of Agriculture.