Cellar & Market Focus

Simonsvlei is a truly committed South African company, driven by a global market focus and a passion to create value for its market.

Simonsvlei is a truly committed South African company, driven by a global market focus and a passion to create value for its market. In line with its vision and core values, Simonsvlei approaches world markets with confidence and understanding. With its customer centric focus, Simonsvlei continually strives towards supplying the best quality wines at the best prices to all its customers. Serving a broad range of wines to a broad range of markets, Simonsvlei is able to tailor its wines to customers’ specific requirements. This winery is growing and gradually expanding its market share in countries such as Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Taiwan, Japan, Russia, and China.

Simonsvlei undertakes never to compromise on quality, but to keep it as its prime consideration throughout all areas of activity, from the planting of the finest vineyard stock to maintaining impeccable standards with regard to bottling and hygiene.

Our Respect for Society & Environment:

Deep and fundamental respect for all people in the country as well as the laws and mores that govern society. Our deep love for our natural resources and our long term co-existence with nature.

Our Ingenuity:

Our respect for the art of thinking, of being clever, of continually finding new and better ways of doing things. Ingenuity is a fundamental characteristic of our great employees, key to personality, spirit, obsession to never be satisfied with what has been achieved, always looking for new and better ways of doing things.

Our Pursuit of Perfection:

This is our state of mind, we are drawn to perfection. It represents our energy philosophy, one of never giving up, always moving forward. It represents our inner fire and passion for what we want to achieve. Our service levels to all our stakeholders is one of such a state of mind.

Our Cellar

Simonsvlei is extremely aware of the impact our winery might have on every aspect of our environment. That includes the natural world as well as the societies and the individuals we come into contact with in the course of what we do. We work extremely hard, first of all not to do any damage and, secondly, to use as few resources as we can.

Growing our vineyards for the future

Together with our grape producers, we’re supporting a new approach to sustainable vineyard management and creating harmony with nature so that South Africa’s vineyards will be able to provide sufficient grapes for future generations. Without compromising quality or adding to the cost, we support the call of Farming for the Future.

Farming for the Future is a holistic approach pioneered by Woolworths, it manages the entire farming process systematically. It all starts with building and maintaining the soil, because, as any farmer will tell you, it takes good soil to produce good food. Healthy soil is better able to retain water, so it needs less irrigation and water use is reduced. It also needs fewer chemical interventions, which means grape producers strive to only use synthetic fertilisers or herbicides when needed. Fewer chemicals mean less chemical run-off, which, along with less soil erosion and loss of top soil, helps maintain water quality and biodiversity. Grape producers also strive to use integrated pest management principles in order to reduce reliance on chemical pesticides and herbicides and encourage biodiversity.

So, all in all, Farming for the Future is better for the land and for the water, and for the wildlife, and, above all, for the future. The Environment

Electricity
Over the past two years, Simonsvlei Wines has used over 7% less electricity in its cellars. We’ve done this by better management of the systems that control our lighting and equipment and by making our staff more aware of the need to save energy. We are introducing a system where we can also check our cellars’ electricity consumption from a central point. We strive to use energy efficient electronic control equipment as part of the Eskom energy saving programme.

Fuel
Simonsvlei Wines makes sure our third party delivery fleet operates as efficiently as possible. We have to monitor this very carefully - especially as we are finding our way into so many new selling points - which means the third party trucks have to travel further. Over the past year we have increased our efficiency when it comes to the amount of fuel we use to deliver each item we sell. We are always looking for ways to improve our performance in this area. Client based distribution centres across the country help here as it centralises most of the deliveries.

Water
Simonsvlei Wines make sure that everyone who grows vineyard adheres to very strict standards. This means that no method used in the production of Simonsvlei Wines pose an unacceptable risk to health - or to the environment - during the wine making process. We also keep track of what our suppliers are doing very carefully. We are also working closely with our grape producers, especially in water-scarce areas, to understand how water could be used more efficiently.

Recycling

Bottles
We recycle our bottles back to the glass suppliers, they collect all unwanted bottles from the cellars, they recycle these bottles back into the glass making process.

Recycled paper
Where possible, the labels and cardboard used has at least a 80% recycled paper content. Our Cellar offices has converted as far as we can to recycled paper in all printers and photocopiers, all our internal communication publications and documents not needed is recycled.

Packaging
The best way to avoid using up materials in packaging would, of course, be not to use any packaging at all. That would be impossible given the range and nature of the products we sell. To try and minimise the waste from our packaging, we try and use completely recyclable material like paper and glass.

It’s extremely important that our customers then put these back into the recycling process - so you can help us there.

Where we do use plastics, we make sure that the kind of plastic used is clearly identified so that it can be sorted for recycling more easily. More and more plastic is being recycled and we are looking at using recycled plastic for more of our packaging.

We are also keeping a close eye on the development of packaging materials that are renewable and which will break down naturally in the soil. As soon as these become readily available, we will try and use them as much as possible.

As well as this, we continue to: collect cardboard and paper for recycling at our cellars, encourage customers to recycle. We encourage our customers to recycle bottles whenever they can – preferably all the time, this makes a huge difference.

Protecting plants, Biodiversity

We are absolutely committed to selling wine that do not cause harm to the natural world around us in the way they are made. We have done a number of things to make sure that this is the case, as far as possible, any wood we use comes from sustainably managed forests – that means it comes from trees that can be replaced with no harm to the environment.

Simonsvlei Wines is dedicated to providing more and more organic wine. Not only is this a better alternative for the environment, it is a more natural alternative for you. Furthermore we have identified 120 hectares of land that we will not farm on, but manage it for the good of our natural world.

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