6 - Selling Wine to the Many

Summary

This chapter focuses on the distribution of wine. It begins with a detailed account of the liquor wars that pitted Distillers against South African Breweries (SAB), which owned SFW, from the late 1950s. This culminated in a peace agreement in 1974 which left SAB with a beer monopoly and divided the wine and spirits market between SFW, Distillers and the KWV who owned shares in a new company, Cape Wine and Distillers (CWD). It is shown that the competition between SFW and Distillers remained intense. A detailed account follows of how the wine companies, and especially SFW, attempted to market wine to a black consumer market, initially through jazz promotions. It is argued that while the SFW invested in market research and advertising, it was trapped in a racialised way of reading consumer preferences. This is demonstrated with reference to high-, medium- and standard-priced wines. The SFW dominated the market for SP wines but because the real profits were in spirits, rather little of the advertising budget was directed towards black and Coloured consumers. This fed a self-fulfilling prophesy about the limits of the market for wine amongst ’non-whites’.