Growing Vines, Transforming Lives: Solms-Delta Wine Estate

Among the tendrils of grape vines, the plump, juicy green and tempting, sultry red orbs, the workers at the innovative Solms-Delta Wine Estate get to crush the fruit and have their taste of the profits too.

Known for its prize-winning wines, wine tours and tastings, Solms-Delta, a farm with a rich history, leads one to believe that a happy worker is a productive worker. This philosophy is evident in the farm’s accolades. Solms-Delta is known as one of the country’s most progressive wine estates, and one that generates real results.

Located in the Franschhoek Valley, in the heart of the Western Cape’s winelands, it acknowledges and recognises that everyone is the boss. The 180 inhabitants who live on the land are all shareholders in the business, and they all benefit from the wine-making and the numerous other activities the farm offers.

Mark Solms bought the 320-year-old farm in 2001. He learned about its history, which is deeply rooted in slavery, and from the start he knew he wanted to run the farm differently. For Solms, it was about empowering others through co-ownership, and ensuring the brutality of slavery and the indignity of being exploited would never happen again.

The Power of Three

Just three years after buying Zandvliet-Delta farm, Solms and his neighbour, British philanthropist Richard Astor and owner of Lübeck farm, took out bonds on their properties to secure a loan for the workers to buy the adjacent Deltameer farm. It was an unprecedented move, transferring their equity into a trust and putting up their land as collateral. Solms-Delta is now made up of three farms, and all three share in the profits. Solms, Astor and the farm workers and residents are all beneficiaries. Of the combined Solms-Delta, Solms, Astor and the trust each own a third.

Profits from Solms-Delta, which produces 30,000 cases of wine annually, allow the workers and tenants to pay for health care, school fees, as well as a social worker to tackle issues of alcoholism and domestic violence.

The workers who create the wine are now also able to read about the lives of their slave ancestors who planted the first vines. “You can’t take on the ownership of such a property and not also take on its history,” explains Solms.

Archaeological Diggings

He hired historians to identify the original slaves on the farm and to research their genealogy. Archaeologists excavated and studied the site’s 7,000-year-old history and found intricate Stone Age tools that belonged to the indigenous Khoisan people, whose descendants are still among the workers on the estate today.

“We set about, literally and figuratively, digging up the past,” says Solms, who is a sixth

generation landowner in this vine-carpeted valley. For years, he and his team went about retracing the complex history of the 30 hectare plot of land, searching for clues that would help him better understand the lives of the workers and their slave ancestors. Eventually, they came across the remains of a 7,000-year-old civilisation, not more than 50 m from Solms’ bedroom.

The workers and tenants say Solms’ project has transformed their lives. “He has changed everything on this farm,” says Medwin Pietersen, a 31-year-old descendant of slaves who was born on the farm and now serves as its brand ambassador at international wine shows.

Slavery

It is a historical fact that the magnificent wine farms of the Western Cape – major tourist attractions – were built on the misery of human slavery. Solms wanted to expose what really happened on his idyllic vineyard. To retell the story, a museum was created in the historic wine cellar at Solms-Delta. Once a place of punishment where 18^th century slaves were beaten regularly, it is now a place of learning that documents the slaves’ legacy.

“The wine industry was built on slavery,” Solms says. “We had to tell our stories so we could learn what went wrong and how to put it all right... Slavery was absolutely fundamental to the working and building of all these farms, and we’re still living with the consequences today.”

He explains that slaves were first brought to the Cape from West Africa and the Dutch East Indies in the middle of the 17^th century. “By the time slavery was finally abolished here in 1838, an estimated 63,000 slaves had been imported.”

After these farm workers were “freed”, they were still restrained by a merciless system that traded wine for labour, known as the **dop** (meaning a drink) system, which kept them in a permanent state of alcohol dependency. Added to this misery, the workers were oppressed by Apartheid in the 20^th century, and even today Cape farm workers are generally among the poorest paid in the country, often relegated to uninhabitable housing, without electricity or water, vulnerable to eviction, and exposed to unsafe pesticides.

Solms cares greatly about quality, profits, and working conditions. His philosophy embraces everything to do with the farm – the soil, the mood of the worker who picks the grapes, and the final product.

A Glass for Everyone

The golden thread isn’t simply to improve worker pay and benefits, he points out, but actually to involve disadvantaged workers at all levels of production and give them equity for their work. “Our fates are inextricably linked to each other. We must recognise our mutual needs and find a way they can be met, because they most certainly can be,” he says.

The history and the people who have lived on the land for generations, Solms says, are South Africa’s cultural terroir. Without doing right by them, “you can’t make honest wine, much less great wine. Wine is made by hand, and the attitude of the labourers affects what is in the bottle, from the way they tend the vines and select the grapes. If someone is preparing it with resentment and hatred, what will he make?”

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