As Mike Ratcliffe steps down as chair of Stellenbosch Wine Routes and Visit Stellenbosch, he tells EMILE JOUBERT about meeting the challenges of the past decade – always with a sense of fun.
By its very nature, wine should be a fun business. And that’s why, for me, Mike Ratcliffe has always been the consummate wine professional. He invariably appears to be having a lot of fun just doing what he does.
Whether he’s building and managing one of South Africa’s most successful premium wine brands in Vilafonté and its offshoot, Seriously Old Dirt, or he’s running the country’s oldest and largest wine tourism body, Mike gives the impression of someone who loves the business
he’s in.
We don’t yet know whether he’ll miss the fun – and obvious challenges – of chairing Stellenbosch Wine Routes for the past nine years and Visit Stellenbosch for the past seven. But he comes across as a cowboy climbing down from the saddle after an incredible ride. On a horse he
never expected to mount.
“Despite having grown up on Warwick Estate on the Simonsberg and attending Stellenbosch Wine Routes shows since I was a pikkie in shorts, the machinations of wine tourism and its organisations had largely passed me by,” says Mike in the sunlit boardroom of the Vilafonté headquarters at Bosman’s Crossing.
“I never sat on any tourism boards or anything like that. But in 2017 Kobus Basson, then the owner of Kleine Zalze and the chairman of the Stellenbosch Wine Routes, threw me a curveball. He was vacating the chair and reckoned I’d be keen to step into the role.”
Here one gets the impression that Mike’s decision to accept was driven as much by the pending challenges of local tourism as by his deep-rooted commitment to and understanding of the Stellenbosch Winelands. And challenges can be fun.
“I knew that this role was going to require structural reform instead of being some ceremonial gig opening shows and cutting ribbons,” he says. “So having thought about it and accepted the position at the end of 2017, I was dead set on tackling the two most pressing issues concerning Stellenbosch tourism as a whole: the funding model for Wine Routes and the fragmentation between wine and general hospitality.”
His first major achievement was replacing the outdated membership fee structure with a turnover based funding model. Although membership numbers initially declined, revenue increased significantly, allowing the organisation to become financially sustainable before they
eventually recovered.
The second transformative initiative was creating Visit Stellenbosch. Mike argued that wine tourism could not exist in isolation and that the entire tourism economy – wine, accommodation, restaurants, attractions, and the municipality – needed to work together. Under this unified structure, the marketing budget for tourism has grown dramatically, from roughly R2 million to about R14 million, and is funded through municipal support, membership and a tourism levy on accommodation.
“I think this integration has fundamentally changed Stellenbosch,” Mike explains. “The average visitor stay has increased from fewer than one night to more than four nights, resulting in substantially greater tourism spending and stronger economic impact.”
Although the status of Stellenbosch as a general South African blue-chip business address is growing, tourism remains the town’s heartbeat. “Today more than ever, tourism is one of Stellenbosch’s most powerful economic drivers. It contributes more than R13 billion to the local economy each year, supports over 48 000 jobs, welcomes 2.8 million visitors annually, including more than 570 000 international travellers, and sustains hundreds of local businesses. Every visitor who chooses Stellenbosch contributes to a much bigger story of livelihoods, investment and opportunity.”
And as Mike is a son of the Stellenbosch soil, it’s not hard to guess what he highlights as the strongest of the region’s strong points.
“Wine is Stellenbosch’s number one offering, totally,” he says. “Quality and diversity are important – and Stellenbosch makes great wine from pretty much any grape cultivar in the country – but nowhere else in South Africa are wine and vineyards as interwoven with the culture, economy and history of a place as they are in Stellenbosch. We can reinvent tourism offerings and innovate as much as we want, but wine and vineyards will always lie at the soul of what Stellenbosch is about.”
It’s about wine people, too.
“From day one as chairman of Stellenbosch Wine Routes, I realised I was standing on the shoulders of giants: Frans Malan, Spatz Sperling and Neil Joubert, who together founded the Wine Routes in 1971,” he says. “And then Johann Krige of Kanonkop, the inimitable Ken Forrester and Kobus Basson who took Stellenbosch into the modern era of wine tourism, showing the rest of South Africa what wine tourism looks like and what it can do for a region. They set the tone.”
But that’s not all there is to Stellenbosch. Mike recalls that one of the greatest insights into the heart of the local community came in the dark days of the Covid-19 lockdowns. “Yes, I know we want to forget about that time, but I was astounded to see how Stellenbosch opened its heart,” he says. “I’m not going to mention names and go into detail, but the level of material charity and heartfelt goodwill shown by the community to those less privileged was truly astounding.”
Yes, too much red tape and bureaucracy can present pitfalls. Unrestrained development, too, threatens the region’s rural character. But Mike’s successor is sure to pursue further opportunities and take up regional challenges from the confines of a well-oiled machine. And who
knows, it could just also be a lot of fun.