Mr Back's family have owned Fairview for three generations and he is one of the most successful estate owners in South Africa.Mr Back admits that he is strongly motivated by a sense of justice The industry, he says, should be compensating for the past. He promised the remainder they would be repaid if they turned the estate around They did, largely unaided. Half the workers were so reliant on alcohol they left when he abolished the dop system. The Nelson's Creek workers' label, Klein Begin, expected to depict estate workers and their families, is being designed by a local artist.Two experiments do not make a revolution but the development has been enough to bring Mr Adams on to Mr Nelson's payroll. Both deals rely heavily on the goodwill and liberal tendencies of the estate owners. Mr Nelson, an advocate, gave 25 acres of land to 16 estate families as a reward for turning a bankrupt estate into a success story.When he bought Nelson's Creek a decade ago it was a shambles. The off-licence chain Oddbins has bought up the Fairview workers' first consignment and its ideologically sound dimension is expected to be hip when it hits UK shelves this summer under its own label, Fair Valley, being designed by the cartoonist Ralph Steadman.
Alan Nelson, of Nelson's Creek, and Charles Back, of Fairview, have sold or gifted land to labourers set to become the first in South Africa to make their own wine from grapes grown on their own land. Freed from sanctions, South African wines have expanded to meet demand. But concerns about racism and exploitation persisted. Demands that Coloured and black workers be brought into management and ownership of the industry have been answered by two winemakers with estates near Paarl. Each shift started with half bottle of wine and wine breaks punctuated the day Alcoholism was rife.
"It was such an exploitative industry," says Mr Adams, an anti-apartheid activist who became a community worker for vineyard labourers The end of apartheid transformed the business. ANZILL ADAMS grew up hating the South African wine industry. Under apartheid his family was forcibly removed to the Cape's winelands to provide cheap Coloured (mixed-race) labour for white-owned estates. They were a docile workforce - the dop system, by which workers were paid partly in alcohol, saw to that. "Britain has no wish, no intention, no secret plan to abandon the island," Mr Cook said. The respected local newspaper editor Bennette Roach responded : "There is no secret plan, it is quite open." He accused Whitehall of dragging its feet on housing and investment in the hope that more people would leave..
