Winemaking gamble bears golden fruit

Three years ago, Motueka Winemakers and Growers made the huge gamble to halve their output so that they could instead focus on perfecting their product.

That gamble has born fruit this year, translating to a cluster of gold and silver awards in national wine competitions.  This includes the champion award for their Anchorage sauvignon blanc at the New World Wine Awards, a national competition with hundreds of entries – and in a category that is usually dominated by Marlborough wineries.

“It’s pretty exciting to think that our wine jumps out at the judges that much that they give it a gold,” general manager Chris Drummond says.

Motueka Winemakers and Growers was formerly known as Anchorage Wines, and its wines are still produced under the Anchorage and Torrent Bay labels that its customers have seen on shelves for many years.

As well as the champion award for the single best wine in its class, Anchorage’s sauvignon blanc also received a gold medal at the New Zealand International Wine Show, as did the Torrent Bay pinot gris.

The New Zealand International Wine Show also recognised the winery’s quality, with the Torrent Bay sauvignon blanc receiving a double gold medal and the Anchorage gewürztraminer and pinot rose both winning a silver.

The Anchorage pinot gris received gold at the New World Wine Awards, and a gold medal as well as a “best in class” award in the Aotearoa Regional Wine Competition.

Chris explains that more than 20 years ago, the family business was actually orcharding, and grapes were a contract project on the side.

In the early 2000s, wine started to boom.  The apples, pears and kiwifruit were ripped out and the packing shed was converted into a contract winery.   The business expanded and the workload increased.

“We thought that bigger was better,” Chris says, a little ruefully.

It worked, just.

“For the first ten years, it was all just scramble scramble because we were under pressure.”

Then the 2008 global financial crisis hit, and the country suddenly had a glut of wine that its producers simply could not shift.

Chris says that by then, the business had 70 hectares of grapes, and the winery, “and that’s a lot of wine to do something with, when the economy isn’t going that great”.

“We could see that it wasn’t really working…. Financially, it wasn’t that viable. It relied on big volumes, small margins, and you needed big production in the vineyard.”

It was far too tenuous, leaving no margin for a bad flowering or unfortunate weather, and “the whole thing just doesn’t work”.

In 2020, some of the business’s 20-year leases expired.  After discussions with their new winemaker, Tony Southgate, they decided not to renew the leases, hitting the reset button on their previous “bigger is better” model.

“We just simply halved the volume of the winery, we stopped making wine for everyone… and we just 100 per cent focused on our grapes, our business.”

Although production reduced from 800 tonnes to 400 tonnes, the business kept the same staff levels.

Chris says it was a risk, removing the buffer of sheer quantity, but their team had the time and space to do real justice to their vineyard work.

“It’s simply paying off,” Chris says.  “You can just see it.”