The first thing you notice at Benguela Cove is the chandeliers. They hang above the working machinery of the cellar – the tanks, the press, the sorting tables – catching the light in a way that serves no practical function, yet makes every possible point.
Penny Streeter OBE brought them from Benguela on Main, the fine dining restaurant she opened with South African chef Jean Delport before he went on to win a Michelin Green Star at Leonardslee in Sussex. When that restaurant closed, she couldn’t let them go. When she built the cellar at Benguela Cove, she knew exactly where they belonged.
“I love a property that surprises you,” she says. “A working cellar is stainless steel tanks – the practical end of winemaking – and I never wanted it to feel like a factory just because technically that is what it is.”
Those chandeliers now hang over the tanks, making the wine that ends up on Jean Delport’s Michelin table on the other side of the world. They are, Penny says, the whole story of the estates in one fixture.
From Rock Bottom to Remarkable Success
Penny Streeter is a British-South African entrepreneur, raised in what was then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and she describes herself – quickly, without hesitation – as a serial entrepreneur first.
“Everything else follows from that.” She runs a recruitment business across the UK and South Africa, launched operations in the US last year, and is expanding into Australia within months. The wine estates and Michelin-starred restaurants are, in her own words, the side hustle.
What makes that framing extraordinary is where it starts. Nine months pregnant, two small children, emergency council accommodation in Croydon. Two deckchairs and nothing else in the flat. From that, by 1999, the fastest-growing recruitment company in the country.
“There was a moment, not a slow creep,” she says. “Hitting rock bottom with three children forced a decision: pull myself up and change everything or accept that this was permanent. Survival became ambition the day I decided I wasn’t willing to live like that indefinitely.”
My mother also raised three children under three alone, and made the same decision Penny describes – that she wanted more for us, and went and built it. I recognise something in Penny’s story that I have spent my whole life watching up close. Women like that are not a type. They are a specific kind of courage.
Most people who lose everything become more cautious. Penny became more expansive. She has thought about this distinction carefully.
“When you have nothing, there’s nothing left to protect – so the fear that makes most people cautious simply isn’t there. What I did have was parents who told me from day one I could do whatever I wanted with my life. That gave me the confidence to be expansive. The caution shows up in how I execute, not in whether I’m willing to try.”
Two Estates, One Philosophy
Benguela Cove is a 200-hectare wine estate on the shores of the Bot River Lagoon in Walker Bay – a WWF Conservation Champion, ranked in the World’s Top 100 Vineyards, bordered by the Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve within the Cape Floral Kingdom. Leonardslee House in Sussex is 240 acres of restored Victorian gardens – one of the most ambitious restoration projects undertaken in the UK in 30 years – with Restaurant Interlude at its heart.
Interlude holds both a Michelin Star and a Michelin Green Star for zero-waste ethical sourcing and was named AA Overall UK Restaurant of the Year 2025. Chef Jean Delport, one of only a handful of South African chefs ever awarded a Michelin Star, serves Benguela Cove wines on his tasting menu. The wine is made on the shores of a South African lagoon and served on a table in Sussex.
They are 9 000km apart. They feel like expressions of the same thought.
“Very early into owning Benguela Cove I was already thinking about a UK estate,” Penny says. “South Africa is one of the world leaders in wine tourism, and English wine was just emerging – there were vineyards already, but nobody had built the full South African-style wine estate experience around one. I felt that if I took what I’d learned and applied it properly, it would work. I didn’t set out looking for a matching pair. I recognised the second one the instant I saw it.”
She believes places choose people, not the other way around – that by the time you notice you have chosen somewhere, it already has you. Standing at Leonardslee for the first time, she felt exactly that.
Both estates are governed by the Hannuwa philosophy. Drawn from the ancient /Xam San people of South Africa, it describes living in sustainable harmony with the natural world.
“I didn’t stumble on Hannuwa in some romantic sense,” Penny says. “I met it as an industry document. What struck me was that the /Xam San word said in one word what I’d been trying to build my whole career: you don’t extract from an asset, you steward it, and the returns compound over decades, not quarters. That’s true of a hospital staffing business, and it’s true of a wine estate. Hannuwa just gave it the right name.”
Luxury with Purpose
The sustainability at Benguela Cove is operational rather than cosmetic – a distinction Penny makes sharply. A weather station provides disease pressure readings, allowing the vineyard to spray only when there’s an actual threat. Biological control for mealybug instead of insecticide. Owl boxes instead of poison. Cover crops instead of herbicide. Camera traps running with the Cape Leopard Trust because, as Penny says, “a leopard on that land tells you the ecosystem beneath it is intact – that’s not a claim, it’s data.”
“The test for getting it right is whether the conservation work can prove itself without me having to say anything. A business that runs at a profit can fund stewardship indefinitely. A charity or a marketing line item runs out of money. That’s the difference between doing it and saying you do it.”
The flagship wine is called the Catalina. Single-vineyard Semillon. Ninety-five points from Tim Atkin MW. Named for the RAF flying boats that used Walker Bay during the Second World War – sheltered enough to land, choppy enough to lift off. When the war ended, all 12 flew home. Four pilots got on the next ferry south and came straight back.
I ask what she would name a wine after her own story.
“Something like The Deckchair,” she says, “after the two deckchairs and nothing else in that first flat. Not glamorous, but honest – and it would remind me every time I opened a bottle exactly where the start line was.”
Building More Than a Business
Penny champions women in business with a particular intensity. It comes, she says, not primarily from her own experience of rebuilding – that was about being broke, not about being a woman – but from what she observed once she was in the room.
“Brilliant women passed over for funding, promotion, and board seats – not because of performance, but because someone decided the risk looked different on a woman running the same numbers a man was running. I lived the first part. I’ve spent the years since fixing the second part, because now I’m in a position to.”
It’s a distinction worth sitting with. The hardship gave her the drive. The success gave her the vantage point. And the vantage point made the injustice impossible to ignore.
What does she tell young women starting from nothing?
“That the safety net was never coming, so stop waiting for one. Nobody told me survival and building are different skills, and you have to switch on purpose, or you’ll spend your life just coping. You call it while it’s still hard, or you don’t call it at all.”
I ask at the end what she would say to the version of herself in that Croydon flat.
“That this is the bottom, not the end, and everything she’s about to do out of pure necessity will look like courage later. I wouldn’t tell her it gets easier – it doesn’t. I would just tell her to keep going. She is closer to the start of something than the end of everything.”
The chandeliers now hang above the tanks making the wine that travels 9 000km to a Michelin table in Sussex. What you build, how you build it, and the beauty you insist on bringing to the working parts of it – that thread runs through everything.
Benguela Cove: benguelacove.co.za
Restaurant Interlude at Leonardslee: restaurant-interlude.co.uk
