The Wine World's Unlikeliest Sommeliers?

Earlier this year, writer-editor Erica Platter — the editor, most recently, of My Kind of Wine by John Platter — traveled around Cape Town and vicinity to report on the fascinating fact that a group of young men from neighboring Zimbabwe, most of whom had never tasted alcohol in their lives, were becoming some of South Africa's most respected sommeliers. The award-winning English wine writer Jancis Robinson and her husband, noted food critic Nick Lander, had earlier observed the same phenomenon, and Robinson published Platter's report on her excellent website, www.jancisrobinson.com. It is reprinted here, in a slightly different form, with Robinson's kind permission.

It is almost as unlikely a story as that of the Jamaican Olympic bobsled team: young Zimbabweans leaving their country ("things were bad") and, after many hardships, reinventing themselves in an altogether foreign field, as champions of wine, members of the crème de la crème of South Africa's sommeliers. They are now performing so brilliantly that they run the lists and advise diners at many of our most celebrated restaurants.

Here I introduce four members of "the team," as they call themselves. But '"For each one of us there are five others," says Tinashe Nyamudoka, Mr. Wine at The Test Kitchen, in Cape Town, the only South African restaurant in the S. Pellegrino World's 50 Best. "It's like a spider-web," says Marlvin Gwese, head sommelier at the stylish Cape Grace Hotel on Cape Town's Waterfront. Melusi Magodhi, whose list at Cape Town's glamorous Ellerman House matches the spectacular architecture of the cellar, confirms that "If you find your homeboy you look after each other very well." They belong to their own WhatsApp group and often message during service to ask for advice. Organizer-in-chief Tongai Joseph Dhafana, sommelier at South African top-five Cape Town restaurant La Colombe, sums up: "We help each other to climb ladders."

And these four are not alone. Other Zimbabwean supersomms include South Africa Sommelier of the Year 2015 Lloyd Jusa at The Saxon in Johannesburg, and, in Cape Town, Pardon Tagazu at Aubergine and Gregory Mutambe at The 12 Apostles Hotel. And there are many more.

Why have Zimbabwean exiles shone so brightly in this field? Among the answers to that question given by members of "the team" are, "We grab opportunities and use them;" "We are good at hospitality;" 'We have a natural gift, a memory for tastes" (they often use indigenous fruits and berries as "markers" in their minds when identifying grape varieties); but above all, "We enjoy wine!"

With unemployment a major problem among young South Africans, do these Zimbabwean "imports" encounter resentment; accusations that they are taking locals' jobs, xenophobia? Nyamudoka ponders the question and then articulates for the team: "Are we riding on other people's turfs? We have long ago passed that stage. There is a trajectory and a path. We have been accepted for who we are. There is no guilt. It was a white field. They guarded it. We had to break in. Now, if I do well, my brothers do well..." Magodhi adds, "Cuisine has changed. There are new chefs, a new generation of winemakers and sommeliers. It is all about new blood!"

Magodhi has traveled far and wide from his roots in rural Mberengwa where his parents were subsistence farmers — from a three-year diploma at agricultural college in Esigodini ("the hole") near Bulawayo, where he was quite unaware of nearby Worringham Estate, site of then-Rhodesia's earliest vineyards (plagued by warthogs and kudu), via Johannesburg, the Swartland, and Franschhoek to the Middle East, and finally back to Cape Town.

After graduating in 2007, Magodhi moved to South Africa, where he hoped to find some sort of agriculture-related job. He ended up going to live with an uncle living in Riebeek-Kasteel, a small country "dorp" (village) in the Swartland wine area of the Cape, which is the hometown of star young winemakers such as Eben Sadie, Adi Badenhorst, and Andrea and Chris Mullineux. Magodhi knew none of this. He started working as a gardener, but weekends and nights he cycled to the local restaurant Bar Bar Black Sheep where he became a runner. He was promoted to waiter, then, in 2010, to front-of-house manager. He had still "never tasted wine in my life, or any alcoholic beverage." This was a problem when boss Mynhardt Joubert — a former ballet dancer with a passion for onthoukos (literally, remember-food, meaning heritage dishes) who has since become the brand ambassador for KWV, one of the country's largest wine and spirits producers — was invited to compete at a top chefs' food-and-wine event at Cape Town's grand old Mount Nelson Hotel and needed a sommelier on his team. He picked Magodhi...

"I remember calling my father to permit me to drink wine," says Magodhi. "He consented — 'As long as it has to do with work and you don't get drunk.'" Bar Bar Black Sheep placed third. On social media at the time, some suggested they had been robbed. Melusi had successfully paired two Italian wines, a pinot grigio and a chardonnay-sauvignon blend, with Mynhardt's snoek (snook) cake, caramelized cinnamon sweet potato, and "roasted cumin bread sea sand."

Next stop, bartender at TV glamour-chef Reuben Riffel's Reuben's restaurant in the Western Cape province wine country of Franschhoek, where a guest offered him a job in Abu Dhabi. ("A little nomadic but worth it," says Magodhi.) Returning after 19 months, he rejoined Reuben, this time at his Racine restaurant at Franschhoek's Chamonix Wine Estate, where he met the brilliant winemaker Gottfried Mocke (now at Boekenhoutskloof) and benefited from what he calls "a fantastic learning experience." Every day off, Magodhi would leave at dawn to catch a train to Constantia to attend Wine & Spirit Education Trust wine courses. (He has now passed three levels.)

"But the biggest challenge of my wine life," stresses Magodhi, "was that I never knew anything about it. I had never had alcohol. Picking out other fruits in a fruit! And asparagus! How was it possible? I had no clue. Grapes were to eat! So I had to drink and read in order to know. Actually, it was discovering something gold. A voice calling your name. And you have to answer." His current job at the uber-posh, exclusive, expensive Ellerman House is "yet another learning curve," he says. "I want to be an ambassador for the world of wine."

Tongai Joseph Dhafana left school in Gweru with his O levels, worked at a cement company as a mill operator, then as a financial clerk. Gweru was one of a handful of areas in Zimbabwe where vineyards had been planted to circumvent international sanctions against the country in the 1970s. Dhafana vaguely remembered what locals knew as "the grape trees."

Traveling to South Africa in 2009 to visit a family member, he simply stayed on, but his story is a mirror of that of so many others. While in Johannesburg he walked the streets looking for work, and slept rough. He was mugged numerous times and eventually, "very scared and destitute," he joined asylum-seekers in the city's Central Methodist Church, which had become a refugee center, often featured in the local and international news. Watching TV one night, a cousin spotted Dhafana at the church. She was married to Melusi Magodhi's uncle, living in Riebeek-Kasteel, and tracked Dhafana down and invited him to visit. After a 28-hour journey by bus and train, he arrived.

"After a few weeks," says Dhafana, "I just thought of looking for a small job to keep myself busy. I told myself: Gone are the office days; here I am in diaspora, and any gun can shoot. Meaning I can take any job as long as it keeps me busy and happy. My very first job on South African soil was working as a gardener at two different houses. About 10 months later, I wanted more working days as I was slowly adapting to South African weather, culture, etc. I then knocked at Bar Bar Black Sheep's door, looking for a job." (Magodhi was a waiter there by then.) He was hired as the restaurant's gardener. "I tilled the virgin land of about 50 square meters [about 540 square feet] and planted vegetables," he says.

"In 2010," he continues, "Mynhardt wanted to beef up his team as we were hosting the soccer World Cup in South Africa. He promoted me to a barman, then to waitering. On the seventh of March, 2010, I had the very first glass of bubbly in my life, from Mynhardt. It was my birthday. I struggled a lot to finish it. Looking in the glass, which was fizzy, with my mind in the vineyards, trying to think how can someone convert grapes to such a wonderful liquid, I asked myself dozens of questions with no one to answer. The wine bug followed me since that day. Though I tried to ignore it, I saw people were having fun when they drank wine. I realized, it made people happy. It is different to when you have a glass of water."

In 2013, four years after coming to the Swartland, Dhafana began accumulating the first in a string of formal qualifications from the Cape Wine Academy and WSET. The next year he dived into the practicalities of winemaking. His mentors were Swartland revolutionaries Chris Mullineux and "my brother from another mother," Eben Sadie. In 2014, he bought grapes and made wine with the owner of Antebellum winery, Herman Redelinghuys. Their joint-ventures Fraternity syrah and chenin blanc have been warmly received. (John Platter, on the Bushvine chenin: "...lithe, delicious... marked elegance.")

Next, says Dhafana, "I made the leap from country to city, to a wine-waiting job at Dear Me bistro in Cape Town. After just five months I was headhunted by Jennifer Hugé, the front-of-house manager of La Colombe, which is a very fine-dining restaurant. The wine list there is my baby; I nurse it every day."

In 2015, Dhafana competed in the South Africa tasting championships. He came third, earning a place in the national team competing against 20 other countries in Châteauneuf-du-Pape for the world wine-tasting title. South Africa came 12th, with its best-ever score. Crowning a year of achievements, Dhafana was voted onto the executive of the South African Sommeliers Association. "I always like to say that determination breeds success," he says. "I am hungry for more, and to turn around people's minds. Especially those who still believe wine is only for wealthy people." But, he adds, "Wine is all about fun! The moment you try to be very serious it is no longer fun."

Marlvin Tinashe Gwese is the youngest of "the team." He grew up in Harare, where "all I enjoyed doing was playing cricket," and earned an IT diploma from the Harare Technical and Commercial College. It was to study further that he came to Cape Town. But wine — "a revelation to me, having grown up in a beer-drinking nation, and a family that did not drink" — got in the way.

He had taken a part-time job at the Table Bay Hotel as a waiter, was quickly promoted, and moved into wine-waitering. "That's when my passion started growing," he says. He enrolled for a course with the Cape Wine Academy. A few years down the track, he has sailed through all the diplomas and WSET qualifications and is en route to becoming a Cape Wine Master. In the Cape Town leg of the South Africa wine tasting championships in 2015, he flattened the field. He judges at a string of national competitions himself and, as head sommelier, is the arbiter of drinking tastes at the super-fashionable Cape Grace Hotel, voted one of the top 50 hotels in the world by Condé Nast Traveler in 2016. He sees himself working in wine education in the future. And, specifically, being "a talent-spotter" of the next generation of sommeliers and wine professionals.

Tinashe Nyamudoka left his Harare hometown in 2008 "at the height of Zimbabwe's woes" when "things were bad politically, and worsening economically." His only South African contact lived in Cape Town. "My plan was to join him," he says, "and get work ASAP." The reality, though, was that "every job you applied for asked for a work permit and most of us were on temporary visiting permits. Part-time menial jobs, where they didn't bother asking for papers, were all you could get. Painting, paving, tiling. I did all these until I got the refugee temporary permit, which allowed me to apply for more formal jobs. But once again you were rejected. They would say you're overqualified or that they needed a citizen for the job."

Nyamudoka adjusted his office-job sights and took a baker's position at Spar [the international Dutch superstore chain]. "I had supervised in a bakery before," he says, "so I had a rough idea. My friend had since got a job in a restaurant at the Waterfront [the Victoria & Albert Waterfront, a bustling restaurant, entertainment, and shopping area] and it soon became evident to me that's where decent money was being made."

Out of the blue, he got a call from The Roundhouse restaurant at Camps Bay. They had a runner's job. At his new workplace, Nyamudoka discovered a new interest... "Growing up, we never had a bottle of wine at the dinner table," he says. "My only recollection of wine was when we would sneak a sip of Green Valley from Mukuyu Winery when our mothers threw birthday parties. And my father's quarter bottle of Montello Jerepigo, which he drank occasionally. But at the restaurant, my superiors quickly noticed that I was keen on learning about wine. They ran an intensive program called Let's Sell Lobster. It identified staff without experience or knowledge but full of enthusiasm. Through their training, my wine journey began."

Nyamudoka moved on via the fine Showroom restaurant to the hottest new hotel on the Cape Town Waterfront, the One and Only. Seasoned sommeliers André Bekker, Eric Botha, and Luvo Ntezo spotted his talents and encouraged him to study at the Cape Wine Academy. He shot through the ranks to become sommelier at the hotel's glossy Nobu restaurant and, off-duty, signed up for an accounting science degree. He won an inter-hotel wine service contest; was lured away to become head sommelier at the Oyster Box in Umhlanga; and was lured back to perhaps the best job in Cape Town's wine-advising world: head sommelier and beverage manager at The Test Kitchen.

Today, Nyamudoka sits on various tasting panels, attends the Michael Fridjhon judging academy to learn more, is writing his final module for the Cape Wine Academy Diploma in June, and is on the home stretch of his accounting degree. Enough? Not nearly. He has now applied to the University of Cape Town Business School for their Wine Business Management course. Stop, mop brow, take deep breaths. There's more.

"I want to venture into the African wine business network," he says, "and for that I need mentorship. With proper guidance I am positive I will make a difference in the industry. I love wine, and I want it to succeed. I want everyone who drinks to drink it."

But, he continues, "Education is not about taking a wine show to a [black] location. It's about marketing. We have the key to make everyone drink wine. The influence. We have a collective following. We must, we do, sell that lifestyle. It starts at our house and your house! Our lives are testimony to what wine is all about."