Wine

Training 2 010 wine waiters for 2010
29 August 2008
Wines of South Africa (Wosa), the not-for-profit organisation that promotes South African wines worldwide, has launched its Fundi premium red wine brand, along with a novel job creation and skills development initiative that will see profits from all sales of this wine going toward training 2 010 wine stewards ahead of the 2010 Fifa World Cup.
Fundi, a top-calibre red wine created expressly for this purpose, went on sale locally and abroad in August, and will also be showcased at the biennial wine industry exhibition Cape Wine 2008, to be held in Cape Town in September and attended by the international wine trade.
A total of 17 500 6-bottle cases of Fundi - the isiZulu word for learner - were released into the market, with a view to raising around R4.5-million for the training programme.
Each bottle carries a beaded neck tag produced by informal roadside beaders, and the wine was produced by six wineries, each individually identified on the back labels of the bottles.
"We invited the industry to submit wines for consideration in an open tender," says Wosa CEO Su Birch. "Submissions were chosen in a blind tasting by members of the Cape Winemakers' Guild according to the same exacting standards applied when choosing wines for its annual auction."
Birch says the initiative aims to ensure that South Africa's World Cup visitors enjoy a positive experience when ordering wine, while building awareness among a new and potentially influential group of "wine ambassadors" who can contribute to increased wine sales in the domestic market.
"The project aims to do more than transfer basic wine knowledge," says Birch. "Trainees will be equipped to serve wine with greater competence and confidence. However, we also hope they will make wine their alcoholic beverage of choice and reach a broader base of South Africans and introduce them to wine appreciation."
Birch says the plan is to recruit candidates for training from both the hospitality industry as well as among the unemployed, adding that it has the full backing of hospitality industry body Fedhasa.
"The training module, designed by specialists already successfully training in the hospitality industry across southern Africa, will give candidates a basic understanding of wine that is relevant to their own life experience," Wosa says in a statement.
"It will allow them to communicate with a fair degree of knowledge about the wines they will be selling in the restaurants, hotels and lodges where they are working or will be seeking jobs, and equip them to articulate to customers what makes South African wines so special.
"Our dream is that among this group there will also be some sufficiently inspired to advance their training still further and become sommeliers either by studying through the Cape Wine Academy or by gaining experience or training abroad."
Birch says Wosa is exploring the possibility of establishing bursaries for waiters to be trained internationally as sommeliers.
A range of companies has supported the project by donating goods such as glass, corks and labeling, while other service providers have reduced their costs for legal, accounting, banking, marketing and related fees.
The Winelands District Municipality has already committed R250 000 to the initiative, to be used for training candidates in the Winelands.
"Mayor Clarence Johnson's generous move allows us to begin training immediately in the heartland of the wine industry, where visitor expectations for good wine service will, understandably, be at their highest," says Birch.
SAinfo reporter