The news that the Nedbank sponsorship of the Cape Winemakers Guild has been terminated is too important in the world of Cape wine to vanish without a trace.
It slipped out with surprisingly little fanfare. The guild issued an anodyne statement saying that it had elected not to renew the arrangements.
This doesn’t tally with the information received along the aptly named grape vine. Tension between the guild and its headline sponsor of 29 years has been a matter of public record for some time. Clearly the guild’s announcement should be treated with same scepticism as a statement issued by the ANC’s integrity commission.
The Nedbank sponsorship of the guild is one of the longest-running partnerships in the wine sector. It began life as an American Express property (with the auction hosted in Johannesburg under the auspices of Sotheby’s, and David Molyneux-Berry, head of the London wine department, wielding the gavel).
Within a few years Nedbank took over the branding and gradually built into the sponsorship a jointly funded and (as far as I know) jointly managed Protégé Programme, which has been the single most successful enterprise in the industry focused on transforming the demographic of Cape winemakers.
Sponsorships that are not completely transactional, so in proper sense of the word “partnerships” have to work like marriages. They involve a certain amount of give and take, with a sense of equality between the partners. As with marriages, they founder when they no longer satisfy the needs of the participants, but they also succumb to betrayal and abuse.
Major wine events depend on sponsorship for much more than cash, though the money is obviously important. I know this first-hand having worked in the wine events sector for more than 25 years. In a properly balanced partnership the parties work together to optimise what the relationship brings: for producers this includes access to consumers (ideally across all of the upper segments of the market), as well as marketing reach.
For the headline sponsor this means procuring for their clients experiences that add value to their lives. The wealthier you are, the harder it becomes to find ways to spend your money in a way that justifies the effort you put into acquiring it. Since wine appeals more or less equally to men and women, and it is strongly identified, together with food, art, golf and leisure travel as one of the rewards of success, it’s an easy fit in the pantheon of interests important to sponsors.
But even in properly balanced partnerships (so not necessarily the kinds of marriages that, for example, Jeff Bezos has just contracted) whoever holds the chequebook ultimately calls the shots. Which means that when the wine industry engages with the financial services sector, it’s strategically important for the wine side to be extra-intuitive and doubly flexible. This doesn’t guarantee that the marriage will be saved (sometimes the partner with the chequebook has already met someone else).
What went wrong with the guild and Nedbank? Rumour has it that the chemistry deteriorated very badly, though it’s difficult to know if this was unavoidable. If the bank was already looking to an alternative project/investment with its wine sponsorship money, it was never going to focus on salvaging the relationship. And if the guild — whose auction has never had to function without a headline sponsor delivering at least some of the buying power to the room — believed that the role Nedbank played wasn’t central to its success, you have the perfect environment for a break-up.
The guild itself is a slightly smug, self-satisfied winemaker club whose members do not depend on the sale of their auction cuvées for their bread and butter. So the success or failure of the 2025 auction is only important in a symbolic way. But if the projects connected with the trust/Protégé Programme are compromised by the parting of the ways, it will be a great sadness.
As with many (high-profile) divorces, the termination might be judged by the provisions made for the offspring.
