Why Zimbabwean couple sold lucrative mining consultancy to start a winery in Australia
- Geologist Viv Snowden, who along with her husband, Phil, owns Singlefile Wines, says after years of ‘travel, late nights and writing reports’, the pair decided to embark on a new project
You started out in mining. How did that come about? “When I was a student in Harare, Zimbabwe, I was good at science, physics, chemistry and maths. I met my husband, Phil, in high school and we studied geology together in university. I majored in geology and continued studying statistics but when I graduated I couldn’t become a geologist in Zimbabwe because the indigenous people thought it was unlucky for women to go underground. So I worked as a biometrician, doing statistical analysis of agricultural data. I had to work out how much fertiliser to use and what kind of fertiliser worked on which crops.”
“In 1972, we married and four years later we moved to South Africa. My husband got a job as a lecturer at Rhodes University [in Grahamstown, a town in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province that is now called Makhanda] while I had our first child, Nina. I studied a postgraduate geology course for two years part time.”
“We had our second child, Pam, in 1980. I lectured post-grad courses in statistics. We left academia after six years and worked for Anglo American, a big mining company, in Welkom, South Africa. Phil was in the mining department and I was in resource estimation, where I took the data and used it to estimate what resources were in the ground, how much you could get, the grade and if it was worth mining.”
What did you do next? “We moved to Perth, Australia, in 1986 and eventually set up our consulting group, Snowden Mining Consultants. At one point we employed a few hundred people, with offices in Perth, Brisbane, Jakarta, Sydney, London and Vancouver. After 19 years in consulting, we were tired. At any one time we were overseeing 100 to 200 projects of various sizes and scattered all over. It was a lot of travel, late nights and writing reports. We loved the work but it was relentless.”
How did you get into wine? “We sold our business in 2004 and needed a project so we decided on wine. It was serendipitous that Phil located a property in Denmark, on the south coast of Perth. We thought it was a nice place to live and we’d always been interested in wine. We knew zero about making wine, but we did know it was a good property. It’s located in a fertile valley and we found out that the previous producer had good grapes.”
There are many examples of people who always wanted to make wine who retired, took their kitty, made it and it’s still sitting in the shed 10 years later. They didn’t have a son-in-law to walk the streets, knock on restaurant doors and who likes to sell.