Charity among the vines 10 May 2007

But should the rich producers really need charities to provide for the workers' children on their estates, wonders Tim James in his latest Noseweek article

Oscar Wilde seems to have said nothing useful or even witty about workers on wine estates, but it might surprise some people to learn of his interesting contribution to the theory of socialism: its chief advantage, he suggested in The Soul of Man under Socialism, would be to “relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody”.

Whether that ‘amost everybody’ includes your average Cape wine farmer is a little doubtful – except insofar as everyone is, of course really trying to make ‘icon’ wines or crack international markets ‘for the sake of the industry’, rather than for personal glory or enrichment. There are, though, gentle souls within and without the wine industry who, if not living for others, are concerned about them. But charity gets short shrift from stern Oscar: “The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.”

Wilde’s suggestion that charity creates “a multitude of sins” is grandly ignored by some wine producers, particularly when the charity of others helps them avoid expense. The current Platter Guide notes approvingly of one such person that “social responsibility is close to [his] heart”. This tender organ was “gladdened” when a charitable organisation came along to fix up the farm’s crèche. How distressingly sad the heart of this property owner must have been when helplessly looking on and seeing the children on his farm suffering! No doubt he still must bravely wipe away a surreptitious tear when he sees their parents sweating in his vineyards for a pittance….

The charity involved here was the Pebbles Project, which aims to help poor children in the Western Cape with special educational needs – especially those suffering from foetal alcohol syndrome or otherwise victims of the winelands’ chronic alcohol abuse. I think Oscar might have given them a handsome cheque, as part of the sordid necessity of substituting charity for social justice. But he’d more surely have felt a surge of anger at some properties that this charity has been assisting.

One such estate (oh, it had better also be nameless for now, at Pebbles’ request), I visited a few years back for the launch of a prestigious, expensive wine. Champagne flowed, and oysters offered us their tender, lemon-sprinkled bodies – well, they didn’t have much choice, much like the alcohol-thwarted children in the shoddy crèche somewhere tucked away so as not to spoil the view from the terrace. (We winewriters have trouble focusing beyond the bottles, anyway.)

Grim conditions for winery workers and their families are not found everywhere in the Cape, fortunately: a few employers do provide better situations than others. Nor, it must be said, is the rest of the world in a position to sneer too much at the general misery here, as migrant Mexican vineyard workers in wealthy California and many others could attest. Bizarrely, one of the forces encouraging at least a minimum standard of labour conditions is British supermarkets – not usually to be seen as progressve institutions, but some of their customers are getting restive. Ethical trading, it’s called, designed to make purchasers in the richest countries feel less guilty about exploiting the rest of the world.

Their local agent is the Wine Industry Ethical Trading Association (Wieta), which audits, monitors and accredits wineries against its code – which is, Bacchus knows, pretty modest in its stipulations. Little more is demanded than that wineries obey the law – with regard to such things as health and safety, forced labour, child labour, minimum wages, and housing security. (Full information is available at www.wieta.org.za.)

Despite the low standard, remarkably few seem to be able to easily meet it. The list of accredited wineries is short, but some are apparently working on improvements in response to the initial audit. Getting accreditation is most important for the big producers (mostly co-ops and the wholesalers – though KWV and most Distell components aren’t on the list yet), as they are the ones who most need to sell to fussy foreign supermarkets. The few private producers with Wieta accreditation (others might have as good or better standards, of course) are La Motte, Rupert & Rothschild, Rustenberg, Spier, Vergelegen and Villiera.

The current relevant minimum monthly wage, incidentally, is R989-1041, with which handsome amount most winefarm workers could just about afford a case or two of a moderately priced wine they help produce – so long as they don’t need to eat, or anything extravagant like that.

• This article first appeared in Noseweek, 'South Africa's unique investigative magazine'