John Worontschak can be forgiven for being more ebullient than usual as he outlines his plans for Richard Branson’s new venture, the lovely Mont Rochelle winery in Franschhoek. It’s a beautiful estate even by South African standards, and he’s just been handed control of it.
Worontschak is an Australian winemaker with a pedigree stretching back an implausible number of decades (he’s only in his early 50s and has been making wine since he was in short trousers). How his company Litmus Wines came to partner Branson — or, more precisely, Branson’s luxury property group Virgin Limited Edition (VLE) — in Mont Rochelle is an interesting example of modern, fast-moving and adaptable business practice.
Litmus Wines is a consultancy based on a very modern ‘cradle-to-grave’ concept: it supplies the total package, from vineyard management to end user. Based at Denbies Wine Estate in the south of England, Litmus not only makes the wine but sells it as well, and “fills in all the marketing gaps” that the estate doesn’t have the staff for.
“We cover the entire business,” Worontschak says, “from management structure to staffing to vineyards to sales. We talk to the customers, whether they’re independents in London or multiples in Holland.”
Other consultancies will offer winemaking services, or vineyard management, but there are none which cover so many bases. It’s a business model used in other areas of the industry: the UK distributor Bibendum, for example, not only sells wine to restaurants but designs their menus and advises on storage, on merchandising, glass size, shelving, training and so on. It’s a model particularly well suited to an age of austerity. As companies look for ever more imaginative ways to cut staff costs, to be able to outsource everything, from winemaking to sales, to one company is a boon.
Litmus has clients in Mexico, Portugal, Israel, Russia and China, offers contract winemaking at Denbies, vineyard services, sales and marketing, and has a partnership with biotech company Lallemand for supplies of yeasts and enzymes. The business breaks down into rough thirds, Worontschak says – “thirty per cent consultancy, 35% sales, 20% contract winemaking, and the rest yeast sales and so on.” Denbies is the “most significant” part of the business.
When he set it up in 2008, Worontschak saw Litmus Wines as a natural progression of his consultancy business. “I envisaged it more as a sales company, leveraging my existing consultancies and advising them on how to market and sell the wines. Now we’re heading more towards a model where the production side is greater than the sales side.” Litmus turned over £400,000 ($600,000) last year and is aiming for a £1m turnover within two years. How realistic is that? “I think it’s going to be quite straightforward. It’s based on two large vintages in the UK, and every aspect of the business is growing, at 200% in some areas.” It’s still a very small operation – his two other shareholders are general manager Mike Florence and winemaker Matthieu Elzinga – but he says he envisages there being a team of five within the next couple of years.
South Africa calling
The deal with Virgin will consolidate growth. Litmus was originally asked by VLE managing director Jon Brown to do a due diligence assessment of the estate that they were thinking of buying to complement the other eight properties in their portfolio. Mont Rochelle was owned by the late Congolese businessman Miko Rwayitare (it was the first black-owned wine estate in South Africa) and bought by Virgin two years ago. The 39-ha estate has 12 ha of vineyard planted mainly to Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz and Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay and Sémillon, “all beautiful Franschhoek mountain fruit, and a beautiful little winery,” Worontschak says, making about 80,000 bottles in all.
What delighted him, and Litmus (“this is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to us”) was the invitation to come in on the project as a joint venture. VLE runs the hotel while Litmus runs the winery, and they are both shareholders in the joint venture. It’s a new direction for the company, and one that shows it can be flexible – “we can either take over or become an integral partner and work with the existing company.”
The great thing about Mont Rochelle, Worontschak says, is that VLE took over the estate in excellent condition, spending no more than R5m ($408,000) in getting it up to hotel standard. The vineyards were planted in 1995 and are “well-maintained – we’re doing a leaf analysis to see what sort of nutritional state they’re in.”
Litmus has inherited some wines in tank – including “some gems” – which can be bottled and sold under the existing label. The winery has six variable-volume tanks, humidity and temperature control, and there will be an ongoing investment in more temperature control tanks. The style of the wines will be brought up to date, the Chardonnay given less oak and more freshness, for example, but there won’t be any major changes.
Aussie revolutionary
In that sense, Mont Rochelle is a departure from Worontschak’s modus operandi, which is to shake things up. After graduating in winemaking in Australia in the early 1980s he was taken on by Brian Croser of Petaluma and from there embarked on a career that took him from Barossa to Burgundy via California and Alsace. Settling in the UK around 1989 he started the Harvest Wine Consultancy and – before building a client list of wineries in just about every winemaking region of the world – he decided he was going to revolutionise the English wine scene, which was then very much a cottage industry.
Working at the Thames Valley Vineyard (now Stanlake Park) near Reading, “I was the only one who knew what he was doing,” he remembers. “I went round tasting all the English wines and they were crap, so I gave up tasting and started making blends. I made dry wines because no one else was doing that, I made the first botrytis wine. It was easy to be revolutionary. I couldn’t have done that in Australia.”
He says the same of Russia when he first started working at Myskhako Winery on the Black Sea coast in 2002. “Russia was producing 25m bottles and they were all undrinkable. They had eight milligrams per litre dissolved oxygen, so I brought in a nitrogen-generating machine and got the O₂ levels down. Anyone could have done it.” Now, he says, he’s just succeeded in getting one of his Russian wines, Cru Lermont Saperavi from the Fanagoria winery, into Hedonism, the ultra-exclusive Mayfair wine merchant.
He makes no claims for revolutionising the Russian wine industry, but Julia Trustram Eve, marketing director of the English Wine Producers trade association, reckons he played “a significant part” in shaking up England. “In 1990 he was a brash young Aussie, but he was convinced of the potential of English wine and our marginal climate. He was making Pinot Noirs when no-one else was – he was very forward thinking.”
Nowadays Worontschak is carrying the torch for English still wine at a time when most of the industry believes its future lies only in sparkling. Litmus Wines produces a range of still wines, including a White Pinot (also stocked by Hedonism, one of only four English wines on its shelves). “I strongly believe there’s a future for top-end English still wine,” he says. “It will catch on.” The reasoning behind this belief is that production will outstrip demand for sparkling, such is the rate of vineyard expansion in England: in four or five years there will be a glut of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir that will not be needed for sparkling wine.
“There’s going to be a lot of sparkling on the market in a few years and the growth in sales may not keep up,” he says. “I hope it does, but if it doesn’t, then I think making serious high-end still wines may be a little bit clever.”
The jury is out on the viability of English still wine, but 15 years ago no one would have predicted the trajectory of English sparkling. Worontschak has been right before, and he may well be right again. Watch this space.
