Cornerstone: a foundation for good

The team at Reyneke with Johan top left

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. 

Lizanne Louw, Production Assistant. Lizanne’s parents were both employed by Reyneke and she was one of the first to complete tertiary education thanks to the Cornerstone project. She has been employed at Reyneke for 10 years – first as an office administrator and tasting room manager, quickly progressing to her current role. Photo by Adrianna Glavianno

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’. 

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