Youthful ambition, master service
In 2008, with cash to spare after the first successful shipment, Deetlefs decided to open a tasting and sales outlet. The location she liked in an area popular with expats had a kitchen. That was how she ended up opening her first restaurant and pairing South African wine and food for the first time in Beijing.
By the end of the first week, the restaurant was packed with customers.
Business boomed during the 2008 Beijing Olympics and demand for South African wine grew. She and Cao opened the Sanlitun restaurant earlier this year, and they now import more than 165,000 bottles of wine every year.
Almost all of the wine is sold at their two restaurants, a decision Deetlefs says she made with an eye to the future.
Chinese Customs statistics in August suggest that in the first half of this year South African wine accounted for only 1.8 percent of imported wine - a veritable drop of the 300 million bottles that Chinese wine drinkers drink a year.
With China tipped to increase its wine consumption by more than 50 percent by 2015, Deetlefs says her sales strategy, aimed at maintaining control over quality and price, will hopefully help her business and South African wine snatch a bigger piece of the pie.
Wine expert Jim Boyce, the founder of popular blog Grape Wall of China, says Deetlefs and Cao have built a loyal following in Beijing based on quality products and reasonable pricing.
"I haven't seen a bigger range of South African wines from anyone else," he says. "It's pretty spectacular."
Deetlefs also bucks the trend in the way she chooses to serve her in-house customers. In Beijing, the norm for restaurants is to sell wine by the bottle with only the cheapest house wine offered by the glass.
"We give you the opportunity to try by the glass at least two wines from every single range," she says.
And it's no longer just foreigners popping in. Deetlefs says a lot of "younger" local Chinese now visit her bar - a shift in consumer habits in a country where not so long ago wine was purchased primarily as a gift or to drink at formal occasions.
