Youthful ambition, master service

A South African restaurateur seizes the day in China with wine and food from home. Joseph Catanzaro reports.

The kitchen buzzed with bonhomie, pots and pans clattered, and food sizzled and hissed in that secret language known only by the master chef. Among the organized chaos, the staff at the newly opened Pinotage restaurant and wine bar in Beijing's Sanlitun area turned the dinner rush hour into something almost graceful in its execution.

At its center, Amber Deetlefs directed her employees with a hard-edged confidence that belies her youth.

While creating food and offering a fine dining experience is a passion for Deetlefs, it is not her only venture. She and business partner Toby Cao also import the biggest range of South African wine into China.

At just 25, she has already made her mark in Beijing.

She has no formal business qualifications but is asked to guest lecture South African business students, many of whom are older than her.

Deetlefs says she now wants to play a role in fundamentally altering the way Chinese consumers drink wine and lead the way in changing the culture of wine service in Beijing.

As a child growing up in Johannesburg, she never dreamt of becoming a chef or an entrepreneur.

Deetlefs says her calling found her in Beijing after her father, who worked in mining, convinced her to relocate to China with him in 2007.

"At that stage, I had no concept of what China was and what it was all about," she says.

Deetlefs was 18 when she arrived in Beijing and enrolled in a Mandarin course.

As chance would have it, her father's company had a stake in a South African winery. Her now business partner Cao happened to be importing its wine into China.

Deetlefs, who sensed opportunity, had the South African connections and an easy way into the lucrative expatriate market in Beijing. Cao, 43, had the know-how to negotiate the business end.

Partnering up, they imported a few sample cases from a range of South African wineries, and set up a taste-testing table at a South African embassy event. The level of interest stunned Deetlefs.

"My dad funded the first container," she says. "I remember it arriving at the house - a full container is 13,830 bottles. We had boxes stacked to the ceiling.

"It was basically direct distribution, word of mouth, no advertising."

In 2008, with cash to spare after the first successful shipment, Deetlefs decided to open a tasting and sales outlet. The location she liked in an area popular with expats had a kitchen. That was how she ended up opening her first restaurant and pairing South African wine and food for the first time in Beijing.

By the end of the first week, the restaurant was packed with customers.

Business boomed during the 2008 Beijing Olympics and demand for South African wine grew. She and Cao opened the Sanlitun restaurant earlier this year, and they now import more than 165,000 bottles of wine every year.

Almost all of the wine is sold at their two restaurants, a decision Deetlefs says she made with an eye to the future.

Chinese Customs statistics in August suggest that in the first half of this year South African wine accounted for only 1.8 percent of imported wine - a veritable drop of the 300 million bottles that Chinese wine drinkers drink a year.

With China tipped to increase its wine consumption by more than 50 percent by 2015, Deetlefs says her sales strategy, aimed at maintaining control over quality and price, will hopefully help her business and South African wine snatch a bigger piece of the pie.

Wine expert Jim Boyce, the founder of popular blog Grape Wall of China, says Deetlefs and Cao have built a loyal following in Beijing based on quality products and reasonable pricing.

"I haven't seen a bigger range of South African wines from anyone else," he says. "It's pretty spectacular."

Deetlefs also bucks the trend in the way she chooses to serve her in-house customers. In Beijing, the norm for restaurants is to sell wine by the bottle with only the cheapest house wine offered by the glass.

"We give you the opportunity to try by the glass at least two wines from every single range," she says.

And it's no longer just foreigners popping in. Deetlefs says a lot of "younger" local Chinese now visit her bar - a shift in consumer habits in a country where not so long ago wine was purchased primarily as a gift or to drink at formal occasions.

Contact the writer at josephcatanzaro@chinadaily.com.cn.