Long hours backed by knowledge
NEIL HODGSON 26/04/2013

Owning a winery may seem like a glamorous occupation, but believe me, there is plenty of tiring work by many hard-working people behind every drop in each bottle of wine; from the viticulturist who grows the grapes, to the pickers and the winemaking team, they all suffer sleep deprivation at this time of the year after they have been working 12-18 hour days, seven days a week for anything up to six or eight weeks.

One winemaker who has been working crazy hours is Steve Gill, winemaker at Appleby Vintners, which is owned by the same people who own Te Mania and Richmond Plains. They also make wine for other producers.

And not only does Steve make organic and bio-dynamic wines for Te Mania and Richmond Plains, he makes conventionally produced wines for others. That means having to ensure everything in the winery is kept separate.

You can imagine the number of tanks and barrels of different wines that need to be managed to ensure the integrity of the finished product. As an example this year, he is responsible for making five different sauvignon blanc wines.

Steve brings plenty of high-quality experience to the job at Appleby Vintners; his first full-time job in the industry was working with the incomparable Neil McCullum at Dry River Wines in Martinborough, where the approach to winemaking is based almost on pure science.

He then spent a number of years at Greenhough Vineyards, where the approach, while science based, has a more artistic feel and where co-owner Andrew Greenhough tries to make wines that make a statement. This is Steve's fifth vintage at Appleby Vintners, so he has had plenty of practice juggling the needs of different producers.

So what encourages someone to take on the challenge of making wine? In this case, Steve's father was a North Island-based wine writer, and after completing a degree in Neuro Science from Otago University, he went to Lincoln University to complete a post-grad degree in winemaking.

Add the experience at Dry River, Greenhough and vintages in Burgundy, Alsace, Mosel and California to his passion and you have a person who is highly focused on delivering a quality product. The fact his wife, Sally, is also a winemaker means she totally understands the long hours he spends at the winery during vintage while she spends her time at home with their baby.

As to the 2013 vintage, Steve says they normally take six to eight weeks to harvest the fruit for Te Mania and Richmond Plains, but this year it was all over in three weeks.

He says even though the vintage was hurried because of the rain the fantastic summer meant the fruit was fully ripe and packed with flavour. He also says he thinks a key reason for such good fruit is the fact the vineyards are either organic or bio dynamic and they coped very well with the rain when it came.

Steve Gill is one of those winemakers to watch. He has the skill and experience to produce outstanding wines, and the wines from his first four vintages at Appleby Vintners are impressive.

Gewurtraminer - Old classic 'deserves fairer go'

A wine difficult to grow, hard to pronounce & which is often ignored by consumers, but Daniel Schwarzenbach reckons we should give Gewürztraminer more of a go. The Nelson winemaker, who runs Blackenbrook Vineyard with his wife Ursula, is funding a campaign to re-educate restaurants & customers about the niche variety which made up just 0.5% of grapes harvested this year. He said the wine suffered from misconceptions that needed to be challenged.

"The typical comments we hear is that it only works with spicy foods, that it's really floral & something only women would drink. All these stereotypes are incorrect & it's time we gave Gewürztraminer its true place on the NZ wine list."

"Many restaurants simply didn't know enough about the wine & either didn't sell it by the glass to encourage people to try it or didn't stock it. They put it into the 'too hard' basket when in fact it's a classic variety & a wonderful match to a wide range of food."

Furthermore, Gewürztraminer (pronounced gi-vurz-tra-meaner) grew superbly in NZ, with wine commentators such as Bob Campbell saying we produced the best outside the Alsace region of France, which is famous for its aromatic wines.

To counter some of the myths and prejudices against Gewürztraminer, the Schwarzenbachs have produced & paid for a pamphlet about the variety & its food matches which they have sent to restaurants around the country & which can be downloaded from their website.

Swiss-born Mr Schwarzenbach said they had little to gain personally because they grew only 0.5ha of the variety which made up only a small proportion of their production, but he had been passionate about the wine since doing a stint of winemaking in Alsace & it fitted in with Nelson's claim to be the aromatic capital of the country.

He agreed it was ironic they had launched the campaign in a year when bad weather during & after flowering wiped out all his crop & saw the amount of Gewürztraminer produced nationally fall by a third to 1250 tonnes. In Nelson, just 63 tonnes was produced by a handful of growers. However, Mr Schwarzenbach said most wineries still had supplies left of their 2011 vintage, one of the best Nelson had produced, which had seen a bumper 277 tonnes harvested.

Gewürztraminer was notoriously susceptible to the weather & difficult to grow but well worth the effort, he said. - Peter Watson