There is an adage which says that the way to make a small fortune in the wine business is to set out with a large one. The average cash-flow turnaround time is over ten years, with most successful properties requiring around fourteen years before they reach any kind of plateau. Even for the mega-rich, these demands on resources can prove crippling.

Of course, there are short-cuts. However, like buildings without proper foundations, enterprises which are built without the necessary infrastructure are prone to instability. One of the easier ways of getting into the wine business is simply to buy bulk wine (made by someone else) and to create an enterprise which is more about route-to-market than about what is actually in bottle.

The most successful of these operations was Kumala, the export brand created in the post 1994-era by Western Wines for the UK supermarket trade. At its peak its annual sales accounted for several million cases - all exported. Its sole asset in South Africa was reputedly the bakkie used by the winemakers as they went about their business of managing the bulk wine, its bottling, and its despatch.

Since its heyday Kumala has been through several owners and a few incarnations. It is now not the force that took the UK trade by storm a decade ago. In fact, it is not certain that its present owners - Constellation Wines (the world's largest wine company) will ever be able to restore its original brand vitality.

Part of the problem may well be the "easy-come-easy-go" nature of the enterprise. Kumala was never really anything other than a concept, a fiction which required the collaboration of several pairs of buyers and sellers. It involved symmetrical acts of faith - between those who sold the bulk wine, those who bought it, the retailers who 'decided' that it satisfied their requirements for a South African wine listing, the consumers who thought it expressed the sunshine and soil of South Africa, captured in a bottle.

When the implicit contract between the matched pairs of buyers and sellers is breached - because growers have other purchasers for their fruit, or because the UK supermarket trade feels disempowered by the force of the beast it has helped to create - the fantasy evaporates. Like the Soviet Union, the superbrand reveals its frailty and it fragments.

The ultimate alternative involves operational substance: a winery, a cellar-door selling operation, a place which consumers believe is the 'home' of the brand. Those 'properties' which take longest to establish themselves have their own vineyards, and they express themselves in the fruit of a particular site. I tasted recently a vertical line-up of the wines of Mont du Toit, the Wellington estate whose first vintage was the 1998 and whose latest wine, the 2007, reveals how far it has come in a decade. Unlike the earlier, more showy vintages, the 2007 expresses a confidence, a more obvious sense of what the place where the vines are rooted can actually achieve. The super-premium Le Sommet 2003, plusher and more intense, is an integral part of that discovery.

The same is true of a similar vertical sampled a month before when Giulio Bertrand came to show the latest releases of his Lourens River Valley red and his super-premium Morgenster. Once again, these are wines made on a single property, developed over a comparable period of time. In the past five or six years there has been a degree of obvious tweaking between the two cuvées - the easier-drinking Lourens River Valley, the more profound, but slower evolving Morgenster.

At that tasting of the 2006s there was a clearer sense of what each aims to be, of where they have come from, and where they are going. That is why - as Stephan du Toit and Giulio Bertrand have discovered - it takes so long to create something of substance in the wine business, but also why, once this has been achieved, it comes with a real sense of permanence.

From Business Day, 23 June 2010