Ceremony
South Africa

By the time we were brought in, Aslina had already become one of the most respected Black-owned wine brands in South Africa, recognised by the Platter's Wine Guide, Tim Atkin, the Michelangelo Awards, and the Sommeliers Choice Award 2025 Wine of the Year for South Africa. This project was never about listing those achievements. It was about finding the thread that tied the whole story together. Over two years of working with Aslina, we had been building pieces of a larger narrative without fully knowing where it would land, until the brand reached a 10-year anniversary that deserved more than a commemorative post or a one-off film. It needed to feel like the culmination of a decade-long story that had been building in public all along. We mapped the capture strategy before the Stellenbosch tasting room even opened, which was the brand's first physical home after years of operating without one. That opening became the first planned asset in a system rather than a memory we captured after the fact. From there, we identified Umsasane, the flagship blend named for Ntsiki's grandmother, as the emotional core the whole campaign would hang on: the Zulu word for the acacia tree, the tree that shades and protects, carrying legacy, protection, and identity in one bottle.

We built a campaign around the harvesting and bottling of Umsasane as one of the most important expressions of the brand, then kept the momentum going with behind-the-scenes content for the Sauvignon Blanc and Chenin Blanc, strengthening the brand's visual and narrative consistency across the seasons rather than letting attention drop between big moments. Everything converged in the anniversary film: we sat down with Ntsiki for a reflective interview spanning two decades of building Aslina Wines, and we built her voice, her story, and her grandmother's legacy as the structural spine of the film, not just as supporting inspiration. That is what gave the anniversary real weight. It connected the brand's present success to the long road that made it possible.

This was never a standalone film for us. It was the culmination of an ecosystem we had been building over two years, and we used it to give Aslina the content infrastructure to market the anniversary properly and speak with authority to its primary market and stockists in the United States, where the brand has its strongest international distribution. Every asset we had built over the two prior years converged here rather than sitting unused.