We have progressed through the seasons without any major frost events. Our newly installed Defender Frost Machine dealt with the one that mattered before the end of the harvest. The fruit was of the fantastic quality and moderate volume. We supplemented harvest tonnage with grapes from our neighbours in the valley. The novelty was adding Sauvignon Blanc grapes to our production and we now wait in anticipation for the result - processing into an elegant Fume Blanc. The whole harvest was managed efficiently by our son Maciek, with help of the Vince’s crew and others. Jacques nearly missed all the action of harvest by attending to Vancouver Playhouse Wine Festival. Tough, with new communication technologies, he felt like he was there.
The main news on the wine production front is that we moved winemaking to a custom crush winery in Cromwell that specialises in contract winemaking. The whole process of wine making is now under one roof and experienced eyes of Lucie Lawrence, a French winemaker, and Jed Penkman, an Australian. A mixture of Old and New World - what a fantastic team!
This year marketing focus was on Australia where we attended events organized by NZWG in Perth, Adelaide and then Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, with the fantastic winemaker’s dinner in Noosa at Ricky’s River Bar were where our PN08 was match with a superb venison dish prepared by a German chef. Before participating in the Vancouver Playhouse event, we hosted wine writers from Canada: Jacques Benoit, Harry Hertscheg and Tom Pausie. All last 10 days in 2nd half of April we spent in Canada meeting distributors and customers from Vancouver to Ottawa and Toronto. In May we participated in the London International Wine Fair. It was an overwhelming event but good for meeting distributors from UK and other European countries. We have signed up with a distributor in Finland and negotiating distribution with Sweden and Norway.
What is happening right now? It has been a good start to the new season except for an unusual snow storm event soon after the budburst time. We have been recently visited at the vineyard by a Polish wine writer from WINO Magazine in Warsaw. Our pinot noir and pinot gris, and a couple of other wines from other New Zealand wine producers, were feted at a large business event held at the New Zealand Embassy in Warsaw.
Lastly, nearly every day we would contemplate what future the New Zealand wine industry has, with all that ongoing economic gloom, deepened by unsympathetic comments from financial and other agencies quarters, just to mention few. And, we think the future looks great for premium New Zealand wine! We believe in all team effort approach to the New Zealand wine business and hopefully we all will be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And, you can meet us, our agent (Anthony Byrne Fine Wines) and his sales people during our promotional event in London, UK in February!
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