“The wines of Constantia became famous in Europe at the same time (mid 1700s) as the red wines of Chateau Lafite. Makes you think.” Su Birch, the head of Wines of South Africa, tweeted this week. Lafite is a famous French first growth – the 2009’s are selling for around 14 000 bucks a bottle. Yes Su, it does make me think. It makes me think, “Where the fuck did we go wrong?”

How did we go from supplying the rich and famous (Napoleon, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Baudelaire) to where we are today, fighting and struggling with the rest of the new world wine producing countries? Sure, we make some brilliant wines, and of course we are getting some pats on the backs for doing so, but we have nothing like Lafite.

Is it because wine has never become part of a general South African culture? The French have it, the Spanish and Italians do as well, and even the Australians have managed to a degree. Wine, despite having been around in this country for so long, still has an aura of foreignness about it.

I think it starts with us hardly drinking wine at all. Of all the major wine producing nations, South Africa consumes the least – a measly 6,97 (2009) litres per year. What a joke, I can drink that before lunch.

I am not naïve enough to ignore the social and political reasons for this. Wine is not a historical African beverage. But in the 350 years that we have been tending vines and making wine, it is no closer to becoming a remotely South African one.

And when I say South African beverage, I mean one that we are happy to associate with a national identity. Although to be fair, I am not really one to be scooped up and thrown in to the trough of national identities. They scare me, but they do exist. And in my mind, wine does not feature as part of ours at all. It is a product that we make, export, and drink a bit of, but do not own as a country. Essentially, wine lacks social importance in South Africa.

There is no real need to argue that wine does not figure in the South African way of life. Some people drink it, most don’t, and a few know something about it.

But should wine be important? There is the commercial side to this answer; the more accepted wine becomes in South Africa, the more it is drunk and the healthier our local industry becomes. But that would put the impetus on the industry to convince the nation that our wine is better than our beer, has a richer history, and is something to be proud of. And so far they have not been able to get close.

Stuck with the embarrassment of the dop system, and continued poor working conditions, the wine industry has plenty of PR issues to worry before they start thinking about a cultural shift.

That’s what I believe is needed, a cultural shift in South Africa as to how we drink. This isn’t a class, or economic issue. The poor and the rich have drunk wine for years. We have a massive alcohol abuse problem in this country. The very way we interact with alcohol is flawed. We are now looking at earlier closing times and a ban on alcohol advertising, all very prohibition-like if you ask me. Thomas Jefferson realised that a prohibition would not work, and argued that “wine is the only antidote to whiskey”.

Of course, this was in an American context, but his point is still valid: the way wine is drunk is different to that of spirits. The moderate, thoughtful, approach to drinking – of which wine should be the epitome of – can only come about from a cultural shift. And part of that shift is to start drinking more wine.

How does this happen? It goes back to my initial question, “where the fuck did we go wrong?” Oppression and subjugation. Treating wine as a method of payment rather than a means of communion. This was a terrible mistake. Instead of wine being a normal part of a meal, it was saved for the end of the week for payment, drunkenness and a means of forgetting. We are now saddled with a legacy that leaves wine in the hands of the few, and alcoholism in the homes of many.

Can we ever fix this? Can we liberate wine from its past? Its mistakes? Can we make it South African? I was told not to say you can’t answer your own questions. Or if you can’t, don’t make them. Well, I’m breaking that rule. I have no bloody clue.