Wines of South Africa (Wosa) said that the losses were due to lockdown bans on sales and exports and alcohol sales were still not allowed over weekends under Level 1 lockdown.
CAPE TOWN – The wine industry is running at a R7.5 billion loss due to COVID-19.
Wines of South Africa (Wosa) said that the losses were due to lockdown bans on sales and exports and alcohol sales were still not allowed over weekends under Level 1 lockdown.
The sector has lost over 21,000 jobs.
Wines of South Africa’s Maryna Calow said that they were anticipating a number of wineries would have to shutdown in the next 18 months.
She said that for 14 weeks the industry could not sell wine locally and there was a ban on exports for about five weeks.
“Once exports were allowed to restart, we had major issues at the Cape Town port terminal, maily due to workers being infected with COVID-19 or coming into close contact with COVID-19 cases.”
Calow said that a lot of the cellars were heavily dependent on wine tourism but that was not happening.
Another issue was excess wine stock.
“About three million litres of wine, which makes up about a third of our harvest and that needs to be repurposed somehow in order to create space in the cellars for harvest 2021 stock to come in.”
