Five people anchor the story. Five founding partners, and the numbers man who has been at the table since the start.
Founding Partners
Emile will tell you, without much prompting, that he was not a good winemaker at first.
He says it plainly, with the confidence of someone who long ago stopped needing to pretend otherwise. He started in 1998, trained from textbooks, and spent years making wine that did not turn out as intended. Then came a forced pause during Covid, which turned out to be the most clarifying thing that had happened to him. He cleared his old stock, started fresh, and worked out what he was actually good at. A run of competition wins followed: best wine in the competition, best in the country, top three and top ten, over and over.
He had stopped trying to express the land and started asking a better question: what does the person who will drink this actually want?
His framework for wine is culinary. He talks about a blend the way he talks about a North Indian curry or Boeuf Bourguignon: you know when the spice is right, when there is too much acid, when something needs cream to smooth it. Wine, he says, is the same.
People are just less confident about it than they should be. He describes his craft as polishing the rough diamond into something beautiful. He has spent close to thirty years learning how to do it.
Petre will tell you that making wine is romantic. He will also tell you that falling in love with your own wine is a trap.
He spent years on the creative side of the industry before his career took him into commercial wine and international broking. He was good at it. But there was always a pull back towards the making. When the partnership came together, he brought both parts of that experience to the table: the romantic instinct and the commercial realism.
He and Emile worked through the Maze blend the way good partners work through any hard thing. By listening. By disagreeing. By talking through the negatives until the positives became clear.
Petre distils his philosophy into three things. Have a definite plan and know why you have it. Listen to the ideas of everyone involved, including the people who disagree with you. And have fun. He says: creating something is very important in life. Doing that with great people while having fun is even better. He means it exactly as he says it.
Vic was born into wine. He grew up on De Morgenzon (with his brother, Emile), the family farm in Stellenbosch, a third-generation winemaker in an industry that was his landscape as much as his profession.
He trained as a cost and management accountant, worked through senior management at a Stellenbosch cooperative winery, and then moved into bulk wine. In 2005 he joined a leading global wine brokerage and his world expanded. He began building relationships across Chile and Argentina, France and Germany, Spain and Australia. Colleagues became friends across continents.
Ask Vic what he is most proud of and he will not point to the deals or the volume. He will tell you that more than two-thirds of his clients are also personal friends. Their families know his family. The relationship outlasts the transaction, every time.
He does not see himself as a natural salesperson, and he is quiet about it in a way that makes it more telling. He has built a substantial international career simply by being honest. People can accept your faults, he says. They cannot accept someone who pulls the wool over their eyes to close a deal. If it does not work, walk away, and come back next time and tell the truth.
Vic gave Mike his first job in the industry, decades ago. On Vic, more than anyone, the partners agree the commercial success of Single Barrel Wine Co. rests.
Mike & Albert have only ever worked in one industry. Mike studied marketing and finance at Stellenbosch and went straight into alcohol in 1993. Thirty-two years later he is still there with his business partner, Albert, and the dream he arrived with, of owning a wine farm, has found a better shape.
Mike will tell you, pun fully intended, that Maze let him fulfil that dream without having to bet the farm. Partnering with people whose skills covered every gap meant the dream was redesigned rather than deferred: lower capital risk, higher collective expertise, and a friendship decades in the building as the operating system.
He is the one who said it out loud. Looking around the lunch table at two winemakers, a finance and distribution expert, and himself in sales, he asked the obvious question everyone had been circling. They stopped talking about it that day.
Away from the brand, Mike is a skipper, an angler, a golfer and a racehorse owner, and a long-standing host to the Motley Crew at his table in Constantia. As co-chairman with Albert, of a leading distributor of premium spirits and champagne in Southern Africa, they bring a national distribution network built over decades.
Mike & Albert are clear about what they have and what they do not yet know. The product is right. The packaging is right. The distribution network, which he regards as the Achilles heel of every niche wine startup in South Africa, is in place. What they do not yet know is how the market will respond, and he is comfortable saying so. This is early days. The journey is about fun, enjoyment among friends, and building something they are proud of. Stone by stone.
Peter will tell you, cheerfully, that he is not a shareholder. He is one of the Motley Crew, and he has been part of this from the start, in every way that matters.
He is, by his own description, the product of an accounting family, with two accounting brothers to prove it. A chartered accountant by trade, he brings the same eye for balance to friendship that he brings to a set of books: honest, dependable, and always showing up. He and Mike go back to friendly golfing battles at Mowbray Golf Club in the late 1990s, and it was Mike who later welcomed him up to the table in Constantia, where the wine club that shaped Maze first began.
His instinct for order and trust is now part of the Company itself. Peter is named in Single Barrel Wine Co.’s own documentation as its Independent Corporate Advisor: the first port of call should the Company ever need an outside, reputable set of eyes on its numbers.
Ask him what he is proudest of and the answer is simple: great friendships, plenty of fun, and a venture that has become a really rewarding experience for everyone involved, shareholder or not. He is one of the tasters Maze was always meant for.
Mike become a grandfather for the first time and Vic is expecting his 4th grandchild later this year. Let’s toast a glass of the inaugural Maze to new family and our circle of life, family & friends.
Every new arrival is another turn in the maze worth celebrating, proof that the path keeps winding forward, generation after generation. Here’s to raising a glass of Maze to the newest members of our circle, and to the friends who make each milestone taste even richer.
