Even among The Society’s Pioneers, Reyneke are a stand-out producer. They’ve led from the front as proponents of organic and biodynamic viticulture, working with a regenerative mindset long before we were talking about ‘regenerative farming.’ But it’s their restorative work in the social sphere of sustainability which is now leading the way. Cornerstone isn’t just a wine; it’s the name of the social-enterprise initiative that is the heart and soul of Reyneke. Its origins are in the late 1990s with profits pledged to help give Reyneke workers housing, education, pension funds and medical aid. To date, Cornerstone has helped:
- provide housing for five farm-worker families
- given access to tertiary education with two graduations (one of whom is now employed as the estate’s Production Assistant)
- offer ongoing support including community pension funds and medical aid.
But Johan Reyneke wants to go further, and with the launch of two newly imagined Cornerstone wines we find out more about this next bold step and hear from Johan about the wine that nearly broke, but ultimately saved, him and his fellow workers.
The origins of the Cornerstone story
I’ve met a few ‘philosopher-winemakers’ in my time, but Johan Reyneke is the real deal. He never set out to make wine. The son of an academic father and mother who was a hospice nurse, Johan wanted to study philosophy. He was employed as a farm labourer while studying for his masters: ‘In a country with high unemployment, I guess there weren’t too many options for philosophers, especially ones with dreadlocks!’ By day he worked in a team out in the vineyards, studying for a paper he was writing on applied ethics in the evenings.
Johan’s two worlds collided when he started thinking about the concept of development and environmental responsibility. A story in a newspaper about an impoverished man who had cultivated a vegetable garden in a protected forest, then taken a gun to shoot a hippo who had been eating his crop, had caused outrage. Some were incandescent that the man had invaded pristine wilderness, others that a starving man’s life was held in less regard than an animal’s. Johan saw that both stances had merit… it got him thinking about the definition of a developed society and economic and environmental equality. Traditional measures such GNP, or Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, seemed inadequate. Johan had got into the writings of Amartya Sen, an Indian economist and philosopher, one of the first Asian heads of an Oxbridge college. He argued that traditional views on development were too Eurocentric and rather than metrics, the focus should be on individual’s freedoms.
Development is the ability to choose.Amartya Sen
These two spheres became inextricably linked when, one day, Johan and his fellow workers were pruning a cabernet vineyard. It was bitterly cold so Johan (a keen surfer, like many of the Cape’s winemakers) went back to his little worker’s cottage and put on a wetsuit under his clothes. His friends couldn’t afford such luxuries so instead had stuffed newspaper into their shoes and down their shirts to keep out the cold. This proved to be a pivotal moment in Johan’s life. The disconnect between the beautiful wine that would be made from these vines and the reality of those that were involved in its production was stark. Johan took it upon himself to ask the boss for a raise. In a country where unemployment is above 30%, the request was, understandably perhaps, politely refused.
With the impetuosity of youth, Johan said to his friends, ‘well, if they’re not going to help us, let’s help ourselves’! They turfed two cows out of the shed on his parents’ property and started making wine: ‘it was rudimentary stuff, but it wasn’t completely awful.’ Next Johan approached a bank for a loan, to which the bank manager responded with bemusement. ‘I'm not going to be funny, but wealthy people lose a fortune in the wine industry. You guys are pretty broke already as it is’.
Freedom to choose
Undeterred, Johan said he was going to carry on regardless, but it was a bridge too far for his colleagues. He remembers how they responded when asked what their dream would be if they had a choice… and it wasn’t necessarily to start a wine business! They said they would choose houses and education, and they would want their children to have a choice about their future, not to rely on the farmwork to have a roof over their heads. So together they made a plan. They’d carry on with the winemaking and would help their colleagues to get houses and send their kids to uni. Johan and the four couples he worked with signed contracts and loans were agreed for the houses, off the land but within close proximity to the farm; salaries were increased to pay back the bond on the houses, and labourers’ cottages on the farm were rented out for extra income.
But the dream soon turned to a nightmare. Two years on, the bank came calling for repayments. By this point very little wine had been sold. Johan had his back against the wall. He was devastated at the thought of letting down his colleagues too. Just when he was thinking he’d have to throw in the towel, he received a fortuitous visit. A woman turned up to taste at his humble cow shed looking for wines to show at an awards ceremony for South African Journalist of the Year. The lady worked for the broadcasters CNN and wanted wines for a 2,000-guest event in Johannesburg. She tasted the Cornerstone blend and asked where the name came from: ‘it’s a metaphor for the workers because they’re the cornerstone of the business – and you’re probably one of the last people to taste it,’ Johan explained. She put in an order on the spot so that at least one bottle would be on each table, flew Johan to the event and asked him to give out the prizes and tell his story.
A new chapter for Cornerstone
This marked a turning point in the Reyneke and Cornerstone story and a personal career (or lifetime) highlight for Johan, who got to meet Nelson Mandela the following morning when he was breakfasting with all the VIPs. ‘Cornerstone nearly killed us, but it ended up saving our lives.’ The publicity improved the cashflow and allowed the business to keep going for another year or two. It put Cornerstone and the Reyneke name on the map.
Over the last two decades Johan and the team at Reyneke have become leaders in holistic farming, or in farming with nature. He is not just a pioneer of biodynamic viticulture in South Africa; he is the pioneer, but he recalls how difficult it was at the start: ‘We made a lot of mistakes in the beginning, but we did get it right. And today, there are many more organic and biodynamic wine farms in South Africa… and they're definitely not all there because of us. They're there because of their own convictions. But it does help if someone steps out into that unknown territory and makes the mistakes and then people can just see it is possible… and they usually end up doing it better than we do because they're smarter and we've already made a lot of mistakes.’
This is exactly what Johan wants to do from a social justice point of view too – build a model that is teachable and can be replicated across the broader industry, because: ‘We want our workers to have nice homes and the kids to have a good education and we want the whole industry to become a better place.’
As the wine business expanded and there was more land to farm, they needed more workers, plus many of the original team, who were much older than Johan, had retired. ‘Suddenly, we needed to buy nine more houses and property had become expensive.’ While they didn’t want the Cornerstone dream to come to an end, the reality was that they couldn’t afford to fund this out of the business alone.
The start of something new – the 1% invitation
Enter the next radical phase in the Cornerstone story and it’s one that we’re delighted at The Wine Society to be a part of. Johan talked to a host of role players throughout the industry, including The Society, alongside importers in other countries, bottlers, shippers and importantly, academics and leaders of business schools, to come up with a model that is responsible, sustainable, voluntary, teachable and transparent. Our buyer for South Africa, Victoria Mason MW, has been closely connected to both the Reyneke and Cornerstone mission throughout her career, and ensured we were involved from the beginning.
Up and down the value stream, each player is invited, at the end of the year, to give 1% (or more, if they choose, as we have at The Society) of the revenue from Cornerstone wines to the Cornerstone community. It’s important that there is no obligation and that the cost is not passed on to the consumers but rather is a commitment on behalf of the those in the retail and supply chain. Johan stresses that the model is preferential to other certified schemes such as Fairtrade, where profits get tied up in administration and add extra cost to the end product. The goal is to ensure contributions flow to workers in full, rather than being absorbed by administration and inspection fees.
The Cornerstone model is fundamentally different in its approach in that the fund meets the direct needs of the community who have agency and a choice in its use. It plays a restorative role in remedying existing structural economic constraints, just as Johan’s approach to farming the land is restoring strength to the soil.
Johan believes this next phase in the Cornerstone story will be a success because people ultimately want to do the right thing and enjoy ethical products without emotional blackmail … ‘people will see that it pays to do good.’
Reimagined wines for a new era
To coincide with the launch of the initiative, Johan and his team have reconceived the Cornerstone wines too. While the Reyneke Estate wines are vineyard or varietally specific, the Cornerstone wines are blends of the best expressions the farm has to offer, little snapshots of what Reyneke is all about. The mix of grapes will vary from year to year but has moved away from a Bordeaux-inspired blend for the red to a syrah-cabernet blend and the white is based on sauvignon blanc, semillon and chenin blanc.
Johan says that he isn’t the best at what he does. He didn’t know about winemaking or biodynamics, or even business, when he started out, but he has learned along the way and is wise enough to bring in people who are great at what they do, including talented winemaker Barbara Melck and her assistant Armand Esterhuizen. But it’s Johan who is prepared to stick his neck out and do things differently, hoping that those that follow will do even better.
One last piece of good luck
The land on which Cornerstone was founded is in the Polkadraai Hills, a sub-zone of Stellenbosch. ‘You won’t believe it!’ Johan grins, ‘this used to be the armpit of Stellenbosch. It was definitely not the fancy part. But over the years we’ve discovered that the land is on a unique kind of decomposed granite and all our slopes face south, towards the cooling ocean breezes – something that’s increasingly important in our warming world. So we’ve gone from being the runt of the litter to one of the most talked-about areas in Stellenbosch!’
We don’t even have time to get into talking much about regenerative viticulture and soil health in this conversation; there is so much ground to cover. His closing remark encapsulates neatly everything Johan Reyneke is trying to do:
'It doesn't make sense to sustain the degraded land or to sustain degraded social fabric. It makes sense to restore it and to make it better.'
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