Tough Vintage for 2012

I am currently travelling in Queensland, Australia, working with our major client's key stores; Vintage Cellars and First Choice. These are both top wine chains in the Australian market, with knowlegeable staff. The stores stock a great range of wines too. If you live in Australia, check them out sometime. Make sure you buy a bottle of Murdoch James Estate wine while you are there though!

Yesterday I was in a store in Brisbane and one of the team said " I would love to work on a vineyard and make wine, it must be great fun?".

I was prompted to say "Yes it is" but had to qualify the comment to "Yes it is, most of the time". The qualifier was because this year we had a very small vintage, due to cold, windy weather at flowering time, with the result that we had a much smaller fruit set than normal with some varieties. While our white harvest was top quality and good quantity, for some red varieties we had such small harvests that we will not be able to produce a wine from this vintage. An example is our 2012 Syrah. Such a small crop means it is not able to be bottled as a stand-alone wine. Does not sound so bad until you realise the implications; if there is no 2012 Blue Rock Syrah available, customers who enjoyed the 2011 and older vintages may change to something else before we release the 2013. Then we have to work with our retailers to rebuild the brand, and that equals time and money.

In other cases, like the Pinot Noir, the fruit was terrific quality, but the crop was down 40% per hectare. So we will make excellent wines from the Pinot Noir this year, but not a lot of it. We will just have sufficient wine to supply demand, so again sounds OK, until you dig deeper....

The cost per litre of wine is much higher in a small vintage than it is in a normal one. Think about it this way: we spend many hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in the vineyard to grow our grapes. And we have to spend that regardless of harvest size. We need to prune, mow, tuck, hand pick, trellis, etc with a full crop in mind. Now, if we are targeting (say) 200 tonnes of pinot a year, and we only get 100 tonnes, we have still spent the money - it is a sunk cost regardless of what size crop we get. So in this scenario (2012) effectively our cost of production had doubled. If the normal cost of wine per bottle was $10, now it is $20. Can we increase our wine $10 per bottle to recover that? Sadly, the answer is "no way". In the current tight market, no retailer, importer or distributor is going to allow wineries to increase prices $10 a bottle, just because of a small vintage.

So, what happens is that wineries have to absorb the extra costs and hope to recover it from other vintages; again easier said than done. This is more so with smaller boutique wineries where they have no way to shed expenses. The big industrial producers who harvest with machines, buy grapes in, and have other scale benefits are less at risk. So think about that when you pick a wine up in a wineshop; in tough times, the small producers need coonsumer understanding of their need to recover costs. Maybe spend a few bucks extra and don't buy the big brand label that is on 'special'? Ask a store team member to recommend something a just little more expensive and enjoy it in the knowledge the extra $5 or $6 dollars is going to help a small, passionate producer somewhere. It will probably be a better wine too!

Hence my qualified answer.

Yes, vineyards are a great way to make a living, but make no mistake; they are not an easy way to make a living. Rest assured, boutique winemakers don't do it just for the money!

Our Man in Japan

Yesterday was one of the hardest days I have worked in a long time!  We participated in the New Zealand Winegrowers Toko Wine Fair, and the turnout was exceptional. There was a trade tasting first, from 12.30 to 5.00pm, than a short break, followed by a consumer tasting from 6.30 to 9.00pm. There were over 400 people at each event, tasters were often 2 or 3 deep in front of our stand, there was the excitement of working in a language we had little knowledge of, we were on our feet all that time, and no time for coffee or a snack - so, don't let anyone tell me that travelling and promoting wine is a junket!!

That said, while it was a very long day, it reminded me of the need to be out talking to all our customers worldwide. This event gave us the opportunity to present our wines to customers directly and to start continue building a bond with them. The wines were extremely well received and our importer Pony Group Inc has indicated they will add another 2 wines (Pinot Gris, Martinborough Pinot Noir or Syrah) to the two they already carry (Fraser and Blue Rock Pinot Noirs), so that was a great outcome. We have worked with the Pony company for about a year now and we could not wish for a better partner. A great hard working team, organised and capable of selling premium wines in a challenging market. Mr Wada is the sales manager (here in the photo on the left) and he is very supportive of our wines. We also had assistance from one of the Pony team as at each session and that was invaluable for someone whose Japanes does not go much further than 'konichiwa'. Tomoko (in the photo below) helped us in the morning session and one of her colleagues did the same in the evening session.


We found the Japanese public to be highly knowledgable about wines, and very keen to taste new releases from New Zealand and I am really enthusiastic about the prospects for our wines here. We presented the 'Fraser', 'Blue Rock' and 'Martinborough' Pinot Noirs, the Pinot Gris and the Syrah. What really motivated were the large number of people who came back later in the day and said our wines were among the best they had tasted at the show.

Tonight and tomorrow we have wine and food match dinners at Tokyo restaurants, then a few days break before we move onto Korea, so watch this space for more on our Asian sales adventures.

Our North and South Dinner

Well, we hosted our Martinborough vs Otago wine and food dinner at Ortega last Tuesday with a sell out crowd upstair for the dinner, and the Welsh rugby team downstairs dining as well. We were hoping for some fine Welsh songs later in the evening, but none eventuated. I personally think the guys were very focussed on being in good shape for the All Blacks on Saturday. Best of luck for them in the game too. We will certainly see a much more competitive game than Ireland was able to contribute last week for sure.

The dinner went very well; a lot of great discussion, some good-hearted disagreements, lovely food, good company and new friendships. I have to remind myself that this is actually my job too!

We thought Davey and the kitchen team at Ortega had done a good job of matching wine and food, including some that were quite a challenge to the wines, but all came through OK. The service was excellent and we can recommend the restaurant whole-heartedly. But rather than me writing some notes that may have some suspected bias, why not check out a blog posting from one of the guests?

Click this link: http://roarprawn.blogspot.com/2010/06/wine-onanist.html

The event was so successful we will do it again next week (sold out) and again in August (date to be confirmed). Think we could take the idea national too!

Birth of a Wine

7th April 2009

I used to dream of owning my own vineyard while I sat in my Melbourne office surrounded by paperwork. I loved my job but always yearned for the chance to be involved in the magic process called winemaking. This yearning first started when I was at Auckland University and met Bruce Collard of Collard Wines, one of the first New Zealand wineries to focus on classic varietal wines. On occasions I would visit the winery with Bruce and developed a love for good wine; first as a consumer, but then I got thinking about actually making the this magic thing called wine!
Luckily I did not think about the hard work and costs to come! So, over the years while I was living in Australia I thought more and more about it until, with the encouragement of my wife Jill, we purchased our first vineyard in 1986. This was just a small 2 hectare block in the heart of Martinborough which has come to be regarded as the home of premium New Zealand Pinot Noir. From that humble beginning, we now have over 25 hectares of our own and several fantastic growers who supply us with great fruit. Our winery is located at our Blue Rock vineyard, which we purchased in September 1998. The winery is located in a stunning setting on the banks of the Dry River where we also have a café and our cellar door.
We are just about to start our 10th vintage and I started thinking about all the highs and lows of the last 10 years and felt it was a pity that we had not shared that with those who love our wines.
Hence this page on our website! We are going to start a diary of events at Murdoch James (www.murdochjames.co.nz) starting with the first pick of grapes for the 2009 Vintage. Log on from time to time and follow with us the joy (and sometimes the frustration) of owning a vineyard. We will post candid comments about events and our experiences as we wrestle with the challenges of making ever better wines year after year, in partnership with Mother Nature.
We are a small family owned that prides itself in making boutique wines that will appeal to wine lovers who have discerning tastes and a passion for the highest quality. In other words, these are not every-day high volume wine labels that would typically cater to the mass market.
Share Vintage 2009 and the rest of the year with us, and feel free to make contact and send encouragement or ask questions! We love to be in contact with folk who enjoy fine wine.
In vino veritas! Roger Fraser, co-owner, Murdoch James Estate