About the Mercury Wine Week

IT IS hip, happening and funky – a week that rocks the Durban wine calendar each year, bringing in new wine drinkers to its social circle and entertaining older lovers of the grape with the latest styles, vintages and artistic experimentation in the industry.

The Mercury Wine Week offers the ideal opportunity to search for new wines for sundowners, those hidden gems with which to impress friends and others just calling out for an old-fashioned South African braai after the rugby.

Since 1979 it has provided Durban and KwaZulu-Natal with the platform to host the country’s leading wine producers, estates and players while thrilling and challenging everyone to the nuances of new releases, old favourites and different talking points.

It brings together delicatessen food, wine exhibitors and hundreds of wines under the African skies from farms boasting histories spanning centuries to undiscovered boutiques wineries seeking a toe-hold to unexplored markets.
In the 20 years since South Africa embraced democracy, the industry has exploded in participants and styles while international contact has been the cornerstone for questions and innovation – elements at the forefront of The Mercury Wine Week experience.

The fun has a serious side too as a key fund-raising event for The Mercury Hibberdene Children’s Holiday Home on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast. That project has hosted thousands of underprivileged, often orphaned, children to the pleasures of a seaside holiday – frolics in the waves, sand-castle building and a life enriched by the joys of unwinding merely because members of the public enjoyed an evening of wine-tasting.
“Wine is poetry in a bottle. To take wine into your mouth is to savour a droplet of the river of human history.” Clifton Fadiman (1904-1999), American intellectual, author, editor and radio and television personality.