SWIRL WINE ACADEMY

With over 20 years of experience in the wine industry and a decade of wine and service education, we’ve developed a training program specifically tailored to the unique needs of the luxury lodge industry in Africa. Our main aim is to provide quality, relevant, and insightful wine education that helps us identify passionate, talented individuals whom we can further develop through the WSET program. This training is designed to support junior butlers on their journey to becoming wine stewards, while also strengthening the knowledge of onsite sommeliers, management teams and hosts on their wine offerings. We are currently serving over 60 lodges through our online training platform, with more than 200 registered users. We are rapidly becoming one of the leading wine education platforms focused on the lodge industry in Africa. Our Learning Management System (LMS) is designed to encourage interaction and friendly competition among users from different lodges—and even from different countries across the African continent. The built-in social features, both within the LMS and through integration with traditional social media platforms, represent a first-of-its-kind approach to connecting users from diverse backgrounds and building a passionate new wine community. 

 Using our interactive forums built into the training LMS, we aim to build an international and inter-lodge community of wine lovers. Built-in gamification allows students to earn points as they progress through the training, fostering friendly competition. This motivates students not only to complete the training but also to strive for excellence. Service teams are encouraged to engage fully with the content and aim to be among the best. Through our leaderboards, we can identify top-performing students from each lodge and earmark them for further development through WSET courses. The leaderboards also promote healthy competition between lodges, helping to strengthen and grow our wine education community . Teachers, students, and other users can send and receive private messages via our LMS, in addition to receiving notifications about assignments, forum discussions, and more. Lodges will see the value in this training model, as they will have access to accurate reports on staff progress and will observe an increase in wine sales as a result of improved knowledge and service. 

 The Swirl Training Program is completely free to all our customers. With our current training model—supported by the Wine Centre and WSET—we are confident in our ability to build and develop skills within this unique and often isolated sector of the hospitality industry. The program is designed to boost staff confidence in wine service, empower them to recommend appropriate wines with meals, and enhance the overall guest experience—ultimately leading to increased wine sales. Our goal is to inspire and equip service teams with practical, tangible skills that support their hospitality journey, while helping lodges unlock the full potential of their wine offering.