Quirk Secures a Vine and saves a Job!

by William Holden

We have done it! We are now the proud owners of our very own grape vine (I didn't think I would ever be writing that particular sentence in a blog post whilst working at Quirk!). But the deed has been done and the QuirkStars are looking forward to our first glass of a glorious Cabernet Sauvignon Shiraz from our very own vine... That's if it doesn't arrive at Tim's desk first, in which case we will all enjoy looking at the empty remains of a glorious bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon Shiraz! (I love you Tim).
More importantly… we have hopefully done what we can to save the vineyard and the farm workers whose lively-hoods rely on the continued running of the vineyard.

As I mentioned in my previous post, there are only 3000 vines available, so those who are keen need to act fast and get those payments in. There is a bit of a problem - for a South African to purchase a vine it will take up to 6 weeks because you will need to receive permission from the Reserve Bank of South Africa to be allowed to transfer funds into a foreign account! (In other words – you have to put up with the typical South African banking BS!) This will, of course, lead to many South African investors missing out on the opportunity to own a vine because of the limited amount of vines available....so much for proudly South African.

Fortunately for us, our purchase didn’t take too long as we got Nic over in the London QuirkStation to do it from our UK account. I knew those guys would come in handy some day ;).

On the whole the process seems to be a bit too complicated and not very efficient for prospective investors.
Even though we were able to purchase our vine immediately, we still had to pay an extra £21 (about $42) transfer fee! This means that we effectively had to pay an extra 15% for our vine. Fear not though, we’ve heard she’s quite an abundant little producer (which is handy because Grant is an abundant little drinker).

By having a look at this post, it seems as though there have been quite a few issues with regards to people being able to purchase a vine from Stormhoek. This is most likely due to the fact that Stormhoek is using an account in Mauritius, which complicates matters. Stormhoek have justified the use of the Mauritian account instead of a South African account because the laws in Mauritius allow small amounts of money to flow in and out of an account, from anywhere, to anywhere, in the world, which is not the case in South Africa.

I’m sure they’ve thought of this, but our advice for Stormhoek would be to set up a local account or mechanism of payment for South Africans to be able to purchase the vines, separate from those of foreign investors. This will speed up the process and ensure that the funding for the vineyard will be sorted out sooner than later, and that we can keep it owned mostly by South Africans...Never forget, local is lekker!

On a final note, Quirk would like to send out a challenge to all our fellow agencies to get on board and help save the Stormhoek Vineyard and the jobs of its workers. I'm sure many of you have attended a Geek Dinner and can appreciate what Stormhoek have done for the online environment, not only in South Africa but globally. Let’s see what we can do to help them out.

 Without further ado, please check her out; we’ve decided to call her: Quirk de Vine.

*** An artist’s impression (ok, my impression) of Quirk’s beautiful vine!

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