Ntsiki Biyela: From domestic worker to winemaker

The day she turned her back forever on life as a domestic worker, 20-year-old Ntsiki Biyela boarded a bus in Durban and left KwaZulu-Natal for the Western Cape.

It was the first time she’d left the province of her birth. “We drove and drove and drove some more. We were still driving the next morning. I don’t know where we were but I looked out the window and there were mountains so high I couldn’t see their tops.

“Then I saw vast fields of short green trees. It was only when I got to Stellenbosch that I learned these were called vineyards.”

ALSO READ: Black South African winemaker shakes up industry

Little did she know that within two decades she would be acknowledged as a trailblazer; not only as the first black woman winemaker in South Africa but one who has achieved global acclaim for her wines.

In fact, the name Ntsiki Biyela is better known in the United States, Britain, Europe and Japan than it is in South Africa.

Humble beginnings

Born in 1978, Biyela was one of two sisters who grew up in the home of their grandmother, Aslina Sibiya, in Mahlabathini a few kilometres from Ulundi. Fetching wood and water, looking after the family’s livestock inculcated in the girl a love of the outdoors she’s never lost. Perhaps it stems partly from her stint in Durban as a domestic worker, but she harbours a dislike for household chores.

“I do them because I have to,” she admits. “I’d much rather be out among the vines or in the cellar.”

Biyela excelled at school and dreamed of becoming a civil engineer – in line with the hopes of her grandmother, who pictured her as a land surveyor.

Her application for a civil engineering bursary was rejected and family finances precluded unsponsored tertiary study, so Biyela moved to Durban as a domestic worker.

Her grandmother was horrified, saying she would not allow Biyela to follow the road her own daughter had taken. The young woman assured her the move was merely “a stepping stone”.

“The mother in the family I worked for was a nursing sister and, for a while, I considered becoming a nurse. She urged me not to give up my dream of going to university, even though I wouldn’t be earning money to send home.

“She said the years would pass by in a flash.”

ALSO READ: Starting out as an entrepreneur? Consider outsourcing these services

Biyela nonetheless applied for a nursing study grant, just as she had sought a chemical engineering bursary at what is now the Mangosuthu University of Technology at Umlazi.

Both applications were successful.

There was a problem: she’d also been accepted to study agriculture (viticulture and oenology) at the University of Stellenbosch as part of a sponsored initiative to transform winemaking from a profession seen even in 1999 as “pale, male and Afrikaans”.

To the young amaZulu woman who confesses to “being very naive at the time”, the challenge posed by “recruiter” Jabulani Ntshangase was irresistible.

She quickly learned white testosterone would be the least of her problems. The black students stayed in Ntshangase’s house in Malmesbury, 60km from campus.

Language barrier

“I went to the corner shop for supplies. All I heard spoken was Afrikaans and couldn’t remember the word for bread… let alone tomatoes and everything else I’d come to buy. “It was a scary start to life in the Western Cape.”

Afrikaans was the sole medium of instruction at Maties. Biyela and some of her peers struggled.

“Some of the students didn’t like it when lecturers spoke to us in English. Things changed towards the end of the year, though; when lecturers started talking in Afrikaans, our fellow students would pull them up.

“I think when people are exposed to things they don’t know or understand,” she muses, “they develop feelings of suspicion and insecurity. Understanding and the realisation that we were all heading out into the same world made us family.”

Biyela was one of a handful of “the Malmesbury group” to graduate in 2003. Fewer remain in winemaking 20 years later.

ALSO READ: Gauteng leather craftsman is a sole man

“I worked part-time at Delheim while still a student. Let me tell you pruning vines is hard on your hands, especially in winter.

“I learned that – viticulturist or winemaker – there were lessons to be learned in the fields, as well as the classroom.”

Biyela’s first full-time employment was at Dave Lello’s Stellekaya, where she worked her way up the ranks for the next 13 years.

Opportunities began to flow, including working in vineyards abroad. It was during one such sabbatical that she was approached by Californian winemaker Helen Kiplinger to collaborate on a project.

Starting the label

Biyela nervously approached Lello with a request to start her own label despite being employed by him. To her surprise, he readily gave his permission.

“I felt it would be unfair to restrict someone so young and determined,” he says. There was only ever going to be one name for her label: Aslina.

She’s taken the tribute to her grandmother a step further with the flagship Umsasana* Bordeaux blend.

“It’s the isiZulu word for the umbrella-thorn acacia… a symbol of Africa but also my grandmother’s nickname.”

* The Aslina range also includes a Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Chenin Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon and Méthode Cap Classique sparkling wine.