A great vintage

Some things pair well with a good wine, and the Nelson climate is one of them. While this is obvious now, in 1973 there were plenty of doubters when a young couple started the first commercial vineyard in the region. Britt Coker chats to Hermann and Agnes Seifried as they celebrate their 50th harvest.

Twenty-five-year-old Hermann Seifried arrives in New Zealand on New Year’s Day 1971. Originally from Austria, he’s just spent three years in South Africa. His family were apple growers but, “I had more of a taste for wine,” so a qualification in wine technology was earned in Germany, which led to overseas work including opportunities in South Africa. While there, he was offered a job by the New Zealand Apple & Pear Board to come to New Zealand and make apple wine. And that’s how the young vintner found himself in a new country, in a new year, in a place called Nelson where a wine industry did not exist.

“I had nothing to lose, I thought I would come and see the place where the All Blacks came from and then go back to Europe again, that was the idea anyway. But then when I got here, the climate is good, the ocean, the mountains, they are all right here.”

Continuing his year of new beginnings, Hermann met Agnes Wilkins (23) at a pre-season party held by the Nelson Ski Club. The wine maker and the high school teacher hit it off so well that eight months later they were married. It had turned out to be quite a big year for the visitor from Austria.

Initially, the couple’s wine making dream was a modest one. Says Hermann, “The idea was just a sideline. Saturday you work in the vineyard, Sunday you drink the final product. But one thing led to another. In the early days, we had European varieties, everyone else was growing American hybrids, so we had the opportunity to do quite well.”

Agnes thinks serendipity played a part in it too. “We just started at the right time because it was the beginning of the increase in wine consumption. Before that, people were drinking sherries and pretty run-of-the-mill wine from varieties that weren't really wine varieties, necessarily. And so we sourced cuttings of varieties that Hermann was familiar with, that he thought would grow well here, and then we grafted those cuttings and put them into a nursery in 1973, and we bought a block of land in Upper Moutere earlier that same year.”

While Germans that had settled in Upper Moutere in the 1800s all had grapevines growing successfully in their backyards, there was nothing on a commercial scale. Locals thought the couple would do better to try their luck in Hawke’s Bay or Auckland. But Hermann remembered a comment made by a university professor that wherever hops and tobacco grew well, then grapes would also. In 1973, the region was covered in well-established hops and tobacco farms, growing very well indeed. But locals didn’t know his professor, or wine growing, they just thought the couple was making a bad decision, and while it didn’t matter what your friends or neighbours thought, it was a bit of a problem if you needed to borrow to get your business established. The bank wasn’t completely averse to lending them money, but the Department of Agriculture & Fisheries had to give the sign off first, and that, they wouldn’t.

Hermann recalls the overall tone as being less than supportive. “The gentleman that was in charge there, he kicked me out from his office. He said he had work to do, he didn’t have time to talk to nutters.”

If they could have got a mortgage from the bank, interest rates at the time were 2.5% for land and 4% for equipment, but with that option a dead end, they borrowed money from the Anglican Church instead, at 15% interest. “Then in ‘76 at the end of the first [wine] competition, when we had done quite well, suddenly the bank changed its mind and said they wanted to be part of our business and we said, ‘We don’t need you anymore,’” says Hermann.

The couple had entered six wines in the recently established New Zealand National Wine Awards and received five medals from the judges – a confidence boost for a pair who had been told they were growing grapes in the wrong place. Around Labour Weekend 1976, they began selling that first award-winning vintage from the cellar door in Upper Moutere, and by Christmas, they’d sold out. The following month, Hermann gave up his job with the New Zealand Apple & Pear Board to dedicate himself full-time to the winery.

But before there is wine to be sold, there are always grapes to be picked. In the early years, there were plenty of long days for both of them, and for Agnes as a young mother, lots of multitasking.

“Heidi, our oldest, was born in December ‘75, and we picked the first vintage starting March ‘76, so she was three months old, and she was in the backpack, and in the Volkswagen, in the carry cot, and up and down the rows. I taught evening classes at Nayland College, and a bunch of the ladies from my evening class said, ‘We’ll come pick grapes.’ So they’d get their kids off to school and then we'd all go over to the Moutere and we'd pick grapes all day, and I'd be managing the baskets in the tractor and organising [everything]. Then Hermann would come over at six o'clock when he finished his job at the cannery. The ladies would go home, and I'd be there with my baby, my bucket of nappies, and the food. Hermann and I would process these grapes, and then we'd go home at midnight, or whenever we finished. And we did the same the next day, and the next day, and the next day. And then by the second vintage, we had two kids, so Chris was there as well.”

Over the next few years, the couple planted up more land with their successful European grape varieties, selling thousands of their cuttings (a byproduct of pruning that they now mulch) to Marlborough wineries who could suddenly see the taste benefits over the American hybrid varieties. Hermann recalls, “That [the sale of the cuttings] was like a Golden Kiwi [ticket] to us.”

After selling out of their first vintage so quickly, Agnes began collating a database of the many interested buyers, except the database in those days was called an address book, and over the next few years, she filled about ten of these books as their customer numbers steadily grew.

“We started sending out newsletters when we had something to say, or extra wine to sell, or were releasing new wine. We had 4,500 on the mailing list, and I'd be addressing envelopes all year round.  People come into the wine shop today and say, ‘Oh, my father or my grandfather used to buy wine from you.’ Often, I can remember the address.”

A result of those ten address books full of cellar door visitors’ names was their mail-order business. The effectiveness of this early, direct marketing approach resulted in the winery at one point being the largest mail-order business in the country. It did mean the dinner table was piled high with newsletters and envelopes for months on end, but mail-outs can be slow progress when you are writing over 4,000 addresses by hand.

One of their biggest challenges has been finding skilled labour. The business relies heavily on the Recognised Seasonal Employer Scheme (RSE), employing people from Pacific Island nations that are willing to do the hard graft. Agnes says the hiring of overseas staff has also provided a rewarding experience, getting to know people from other cultures.

“Anna and I went to the Solomon Islands in December. We've been employing RSE guys since the beginning of the programme, going on 16 years. We've got a core from the Pacific Islands and from the Solomon Islands. They come to us at the beginning of the year and they stay seven months, and some come at the end. We like them to be at home at Christmas. We went up there just before Christmas so that we could catch all the boys at home, and we met all their families. They have absolutely nothing, and they made such a fuss to see us there. And not only the guys that are here now but people that worked here years ago. They came and caught up with us and showed us what they'd done with their money. And it's just so, so humbling.”

The family also hire a lot of young graduate winemakers from the Northern Hemisphere who are keen for industry work and experience in their off season. “In the old days, they used to stay with us – some were in the house, and some were in the caravan.” Anna’s recollection from her younger years was a seasonal stream of Austrians and Germans surfacing for meals from the basement.

Agnes recalls, “When you go to visit those guys back home, they're so excited to see you. I think of last year, we visited one of the guys from Austria. He was so excited to see us and to show us what he's doing; anything that he's learned from what he saw here that he might be doing.”

Aside from needing staff, other challenges are varied and oftentimes complex. Like ever-increasing competition in an already saturated industry. Export markets that dry up overnight when a war begins, or lower sales to younger generations who haven’t embraced wine to the same degree as Gen X and Baby Boomers. Plus, for responsible drivers, the palatability of zero and low alcohol wines has not translated as well as beer. All this means the Seifried’s are always looking for new markets to sell to. That’s Anna Seifried’s job – sales and marketing.

Anna, like the other two Seifried children, has been working in the business since she was young and can clearly recall memories as a seven-year-old, gloved up and doing an hour’s work on frosty winter mornings, splitting wood on the back of a tractor before biking off to school. But like her older siblings, the hard work didn’t put Anna off, and their continued involvement in the business is very much a team effort – and one of the things that Agnes and Hermann feel proud of. The branding on the label: Family Winemakers.

Agnes says, “We would never have grown to the degree that we have if we didn't have that sort of backup [of the kids]. And at this point, everything's working really well. They've all got different areas.”

Heidi is a winemaker and viticulturalist (Lincoln University) and deals with the endless compliance and regulation changes, Chris is also a qualified winemaker (from Charles Sturt University in NSW) and looks after all winery operations (i.e. bottling and distribution), and Anna graduated from Adelaide University in International Wine Business and oversees sales channels.

Technically, Agnes says she is retired but still comes in at least one day a week and is the unofficial Font of All Company Knowledge. Hermann, among many other things, still opens the gates at 7am every morning and shuts them again in the evening. It’s been a business the couple have been deeply invested in, and consumed by, since 1973.

Seifried’s is unique for having responsibility and quality control of all facets of the business. While some wineries buy other vineyards’ grapes to make their wines or outsource the bottling, warehousing, sales, or distribution, they do all of it. Seifried’s has 330 hectares on 10 sites, growing 14 different grape varieties and selling them in over 25 different markets. They’ve also received countless New Zealand and International awards for their wines.

So, as Seifried Family Winemakers, the oldest commercial vineyard in the South Island, celebrates its 50^th vintage, it seems a fitting time to say a big thanks for their immense contribution to our local wine industry. Cheers to that.