"I think there are prejudices all over. Number one, she's a woman. Number two, she's black," he said of Biyela. "I definitely think there are barriers, but we are not scared of those barriers. Not her, not I."
BIYELA admitting being scared when Lello told her she would be the sole winemaker at Stellakaya, not someone's deputy.
"He just believed in me," she said. Although Stellakaya is small, producing 87,000 bottles a year, its wines are distributed in California and parts of Europe.
The first steps to black empowerment in South Africa's wine industry occurred thousands of miles away in New York: at Acker Merrall & Condit, America's oldest wine store.
In 1978, during the apartheid era, a young teetotaler named Jabulani Ntshangase left South Africa to study business in New York, earning money as a packer in the storeroom at Acker Merrall & Condit.
Ntshangase went on to become one of the country's first black wine producers and helped found the South African Airways Wine Education Trust to educate disadvantaged students in viticulture (grape growing) and oenology (winemaking). He was the connoisseur who introduced Biyela to wine, swirling the liquid and explaining its qualities.
At Acker Merrall & Condit, Ntshangase, too, had listened with perplexity to the wine merchants extolling their products' virtues, calling a liquid "dry."
"At first I thought I wasn't hearing them properly," he said. "The second thing was this guy opening up this wine, pouring it so beautifully into a glass and looking at it and saying, 'Wow, this thing has got some legs.' It was the way they were describing the wines which really caught me.
"It didn't take me long. I said, 'I want to be a part of this.' "
Back in South Africa, after the end of apartheid and the start of free elections in 1994, Ntshangase and others started the wine education trust to try to introduce more blacks into the industry.
"I set off to go around high schools. I was talking to these kids aged 14 to 18, just telling them about a whole new occupation that was out there: viticulture and oenology. Their schoolteachers didn't even know what viticulture and oenology was."
Biyela had dreamed of being an engineer, but took her teachers' advice and filled out an application form for a winemaking scholarship. At the time she thought wine was like a fizzy cider drink, but it did not seem to matter much. As the child of poor parents with no money for university fees, it would not really have mattered what course she got into.
