Ep. 2542 4th Anniversary Special | Voices with Cynthia Chaplin

Today marks four years since I took on the show, and it is really a great moment for reflection. This has given me a safe place to invite people onto a stage where they can speak freely about their hurdles, their successes, their lessons, strategies, advice, and hopes for the future. I tried to divide up my choices by category, women in wine, BIPOC wine people, LGBTQ plus wine people, foreign wine makers, career wine professionals, sustainability caretakers, educators, allies, the diversity patrol, and people focused on ensuring the future of accessibility to everyone who wants to get into wine. Lucky for me, many of my guests crossed over the lines of two or more categories, so I hope you'll enjoy hearing some of these brief outtakes. Welcome to the Italian wine podcast. I'm Cynthia Chaplin, and this is Voices. Every Wednesday, I will be sharing conversations with international wine industry professionals discussing issues in diversity, equity, and inclusion through their personal experiences working in the field of wine. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and rate our show wherever you get your pods. Welcome to Voices. I'm your host, Cynthia Chaplin, and this is a very special episode of Voices for me. Today marks four years since I took on the show, and it is really a great moment for reflection. Huge thanks must go to Stevie Kim, the founder of the Italian Wine Podcast, who entrusted me with voices in those very early days. Although I had listened to many podcasts, I had never hosted one, so it was quite the challenge. The mission of the show was to showcase unheard voices from within our wine industry with a focus on women and people of color. As the show grew and took shape, I'm truly pleased to say that Voices has expanded to include wine professionals from underrepresented communities in wine, the LGBTQ plus community, people who have followed various career paths in wine, educators who are working to make wine more accessible, wine people who care deeply about the 360 degree sustainability of our industry, winemakers in challenging situations around the world, conversations about allyship, diversity, communication, and so much more. Voices has given me a safe place to invite people onto a stage where they can speak freely about their hurdles, their successes, their lessons, strategies, advice, and hopes for the future. While hosting Voices over the past four years, I've become a passionate defender of diversity, equity, and inclusion in wine, and I've had the invaluable opportunity to learn what those values mean to a vast number of people. I've become a devoted champion of making space to listen, to hear new and different perspectives, to podcast myself a mile in someone else's shoes, and hopefully bring inspiration, solidarity, and humanity to our shared wine world. We've all heard the saying, may you live in interesting times, used as an ironic curse since interesting here usually means troubled. We definitely live in a world of great uncertainty and fear with war, tariffs, sanctions, geopolitics, financial difficulties, sagging economies, and changing consumer trends all negatively affecting the wine industry we love. However, hosting voices for these past four years across almost 200 episodes has shown me that wine people are some of the most generous, creative, expansive, thoughtful about. You can find all my past interviews in the back catalog of the Italian Wine Podcast website and on all the usual platforms where you typically listen to podcasts. A big shout out to all the Italian Wine Podcast producers I've worked with, past and present, from Joy Livingston and Elena Volaschina to Beatrice Mottele and Rosa Zarmouk Hametova, I thank all of you for your enthusiasm, encouragement, patience, and support. I tried to divide up my choices by category, women in wine, BIPOC wine people, LGBTQ plus wine people, foreign wine makers, career wine professionals, sustainability caretakers, educators, allies, the diversity patrol, and people focused on ensuring the future of accessibility to everyone who wants to get into wine. Lucky for me, many of my guests crossed over the lines of two or more categories, so I hope you'll enjoy hearing some of these brief outtakes from fascinating inter Mitsiki Vayela was another of my favorite conversations. She was the first black female winemaker in South Africa, and she went on to win medals and eventually be named in 2017 as one of Forbes' top 20 most innovative women in wine. I spoke to Nitsiki about a lot of topics, how difficult it was for her as a young black woman to get into a wine university in 1998 at Stellenbosch where they only spoke Afrikaans, and there were very few black students. Your path to coming into wine wasn't that obvious. I I know you had never tasted wine before you were offered a scholarship to study winemaking at Stellenbosch University. What made you decide to accept that scholarship and go into winemaking? I think it wasn't really about winemaking per se that made me take the scholarship. It was a need to change my life. It was a need to do something. And so when the scholarship came and it said winemaking, I was like, I'll take it because I wanted to change my life. I wanted to study. Those were the key things that I wanted. The fact that it came is in winemaking form, it for me, it wasn't really the reason for choosing it. But it was the the reason was to change my life. What were you doing before the scholarship came along? So I finished matric, and as I started applying for bursaries, I was but all the bursaries I was applying for, I was getting, obviously, the the very famous letters coming back saying we regret. So I got a job. I worked for a year as a domestic worker. So when I called got called in school, I was already working as a domestic worker. So I worked for a year, and then I got this opportunity to apply for this scholarship, and then I did that. When was that? Because it's you're you're younger than I am, so this is not in the distant past. I don't know. It was in 1997, then '98. Wow. Yeah. So very recently. Very recently. Yeah. So I worked in I was working in 1998, and then, I've got the scholarship to come to Stellenbosch then a year after. That's that's incredible. How was it learning about wine literally from sort of ground zero? I think it wasn't really about wine. It was learning in Africans. That was the tricky part. Part. It was learning in a different culture. It was being in a different environment, which doesn't look like the environment I grew up in, which doesn't feel like the environment I grew up in, and culturally and in all aspects of it. So it was that that basically was more challenging. But for me, it was one of those to say, no matter what comes my way, I need to get this degree. I need to pass. I need to I need to succeed in what I'm doing. You won a gold medal for your first red wine. Tell me a little bit about that. Oh, yes. That was a a Cape Cross. It was a Cape Blend, Pinotash, Cab, and, and Merlot. So one I think one thing I remember most about that was when we the awards, it was like an angel, international wine awards. So when the awards was announced, it was very interesting that in the room at the event, I remember clearly there were two black people. It was me and Tariro Masaidi, who is a winemaker. It's a guy from his from Zim, but he was making wine for, I think at that time, one of the wineries. So there are the two of us as black people, and then the rest of the black people were the waiters and waitresses. It must have been like being at university all over again. Absolutely. And I think what that even touched me because what happened is when the awards were being announced and when they called the Stelikaya Cape Cross, the waiters and waitresses screamed with excitement. And I was like I was like, oh my god. They know me. Like, it is yeah. That must have been so self affirming. That's an amazing moment. It was a moving