Banele Vakele founded Tembela Wines in 2020 as an after-hours side project while working as assistant winemaker for Duncan Savage at Savage Wines in Cape Town’s Salt River. Raised in Khayelitsha township after his family relocated from the Eastern Cape, Vakele earned a scholarship to a Constantia high school where a classroom view of a neighbouring vineyard sparked his interest in wine; he went on to study viticulture and oenology at Elsenburg Agricultural College and complete the Cape Winemakers Guild Protégé Programme, with stints in Burgundy, Oregon and Australia. The label is named for his late mother, Tembela — isiXhosa for “faith,” “hope” and “belief” — and its watercolour labels depict women in traditional Xhosa dress, a tribute to both his heritage and hers.
Tembela’s wines are built from small parcels of old, dry-farmed vines across the Western Cape — Karibib and Langverwacht for the flagship Syrah, and old Stellenbosch and Darling Chenin Blanc sites — vinified with native-yeast, minimal-intervention methods including whole-bunch fermentation and ageing in neutral oak. Vakele left Savage Wines in 2025 to run Tembela full-time, and 2026 brings two new additions to the two-wine range: a Darling Grenache Noir and a single-vineyard 1993-planted Darling Chenin Blanc, alongside a long-anticipated joint Cabernet Sauvignon project with mentor Duncan Savage due for release in October 2026.
Production has grown quickly — from roughly 8,000 bottles in 2024 to about 10,500 in 2025, with another jump planned for 2026 — and Vakele recently secured his first dedicated cellar space at the historic Eendrag farm on the slopes of the Helderberg in Somerset West. There’s no public tasting room or cellar-door programme; Vakele takes a hands-on, direct-to-trade approach, travelling to present the wines himself, with bottles sold directly from the producer and through specialist importers and merchants. His 2025 Syrah recently won the iTOO Next Generation Award.
