A Winemaker Like No Other: Meeting Ntsiki Biyela of Aslina Wines

There are moments in this work that remind you why you fell in love with wine in the first place. Not a bottle — a person. Last year, we had the great privilege of hosting Ntsiki Biyela in our tasting room, and I'm still thinking about it.

Ntsiki is the founder and winemaker of Aslina Wines in South Africa. She is also, by any honest accounting, a historic figure — the country's first Black woman winemaker. But I want to resist the urge to reduce her to a headline, because what struck me most about spending time with her wasn't the weight of what she's overcome. It was the clarity of her vision, and the completely singular way she sees wine.

A Village, a Scholarship, and a Language No One Spoke

Ntsiki grew up in Mahlabathini, a rural village in KwaZulu-Natal, in the heart of Zulu country. She grew up speaking Zulu, surrounded by a community that had no relationship with wine — not culturally, not historically, not at all. As apartheid drew to a close, there was a recognition that South Africa's wine industry had been built entirely without Black African voices, and a scholarship program was created to begin changing that.

When the opportunity arrived in her village, Ntsiki didn't know what winemaking was. She just knew it was a chance to go to university, and she took it.

What she found at Stellenbosch University was a culture shock that's difficult to fully convey. She had grown up in a Zulu village where she was, naturally, part of the majority. Suddenly she was at a university where she was a minority — and not just racially. The institution operated in Afrikaans. Even the Black South African students she encountered spoke Afrikaans, not Zulu. She was linguistically and culturally isolated in ways that went layers deep.

She thought about quitting. She stayed anyway.

In 2003, she graduated with a BSc in Viticulture and Oenology. The following year, she joined Stellekaya Winery as their head winemaker — becoming, in that moment, the first Black woman winemaker in South Africa. In 2009, she was named South Africa's Woman Winemaker of the Year.

Founding Aslina: A Name That Carries Everything

After thirteen years at Stellekaya, Ntsiki made the leap to found her own label. She named it Aslina, after her grandmother — the woman who raised her, whose quiet strength shaped everything Ntsiki would become. It is a name she carries into every bottle.

The flagship wine, Umsasane, is a Bordeaux-style blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and Petit Verdot. Umsasane is the Zulu word for the acacia tree — an icon across the African landscape — and it was also her grandmother's nickname. As Ntsiki put it, it's a double dose of grandma in every glass.

Wine Without the Weight of History

Here is what I keep coming back to from our afternoon together: Ntsiki did not grow up studying the great wines of Burgundy and Bordeaux. She didn't spend her formative years learning which producers were considered canonical, which styles were "correct," which descriptors carried authority. She came to wine entirely from the outside.

And rather than treating that as a deficit to overcome, she has turned it into her greatest asset.

When she describes her wines, she reaches for the sensory world of her childhood — not truffles and forest floor, but the smell of the spicebush tree near her home in KwaZulu-Natal, or the tang of amasi, the fermented milk that's a staple of Zulu cooking. She isn't trying to make a South African version of something European. She isn't in dialogue with Bordeaux or chasing someone else's benchmark. She is making wine that is hers — rooted in African soil, in African memory, in the specific texture of a specific life.

That freedom is rare. Most winemakers — even excellent ones — are in conversation with tradition, whether they're honoring it or reacting against it. Ntsiki steps outside that conversation entirely. The result is wine that feels genuinely, unmistakably itself.

Why We're Carrying Her Wines

At Accent Wine Parlor, we talk a lot about small producers, about wines that taste like somewhere and someone. Ntsiki Biyela embodies that idea more completely than almost anyone we've encountered. Her wines are not just delicious — though they are, emphatically, delicious. They are the expression of a perspective that exists nowhere else in the world of wine.

Her story is also a reminder of something important: the wine world has historically been a narrow place, shaped by a veryspecific cultural and economic lens. Ntsiki didn't just find a way in. She is actively widening the door — through her work on the Pinotage Youth Development Academy, which trains young South Africans from disadvantaged communities for careers in wine, and through simply existing and thriving in spaces that weren't built for her.

We're proud to have her wines on our shelves. Come in and try them. And if you ever have the chance to hear her tell her own story, take it.

Aslina Wines are currently available at Accent Wine Parlor. Ask us about the Umsasane Bordeaux blend and the Chardonnay — both outstanding.