From helper to winemaker

TRAILBLAZER: FORMER DOMESTIC WORKER BIYELA TELLS OF JOURNEY TO GLOBAL ACCLAIM

- Jim Freeman

She is better known in the US, Britain, Europe and Japan than in SA.

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."

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.

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.