What you can do for New Zealand wine?

 The sales challenge from Vintage 2014 is significant as we all know. With the harvest 29% larger than 2013 the need to lift sales is obvious. For the four months to the end of October exports are up 12% in volume, a good start to the export year, but clearly an even stronger performance is needed in coming months.

While marketing and sales teams are revving up to meet this year’s sales targets, back in the vineyards thoughts are clearly focussed on what 2015 has in store.

In our agriculturally-based industry there is always great uncertainty when contemplating the outlook for the season. Spring frosts (of which there have been more than a few in recent weeks), a cool flowering, the carbohydrate status of the vines, a dry, cool, hot or wet season, all these create uncertainty around the vintage, its size and its quality.

Of course as growers and wineries we do our very best to bend mother nature to our will. We monitor the weather, assess nutrient status, we tend the vines closely, shoot and crop thin, spray, fertilise and irrigate, leaf pluck and lift, through spring, summer and into autumn. All that work comes to something or nothing at vintage when we work out whether nature has been compliant; whether we have produced the desired quality and volume of grapes that each of us aimed for.

Blood, sweat and tears, year after year. And on the back of vision, dedication and sheer hard slog, New Zealand wine’s international reputation has been built. In a generation we have gone from nowhere to somewhere on the world stage. From exports of zero in the early 1980s to $1.3 billion today, with our eyes firmly focussed on $2 billion by 2020 or thereabouts.

New Zealand’s reputation for quality wine was identified in the 2011 PWC report as the reason consumers around the world are prepared, on average, to pay more for our wines than wines from other countries. In the UK at the moment, that reputation is the reason the New Zealand average price is £7.34 per bottle, 90 pence higher than any other country; the reason the New Zealand average price is a whopping £2.00 above the UK average.

The high average price for New Zealand wine underpins every aspect of the New Zealand wine industry as we know it. 35,000 ha of grapes, 250+ million litres of sales, $1.3 billion of exports, land and grape prices, bank and investor confidence in the sector, all depend on that high average price. That means they depend directly on the industry’s reputation for quality.

So as individual grape growers and wineries our relationship with the New Zealand wine reputation is a mutually symbiotic one – we both depend on it and we contribute to it.

Going into vintage 2015 that suggests that not only should each of us be setting our own individual goals for the season, but we should also be considering how each of us can add to New Zealand’s quality reputation. If all of us add to the positive reputation then we will all benefit. And as colleagues and peers, we should all be asking each other ‘What are you doing this year to contribute to the reputation of New Zealand wine?’

This symbiotic relationship is one of the key reasons we all care so deeply. It is the primary purpose for the very existence of New Zealand Winegrowers. It is the reason that growers and wineries get so upset when there are threats to that reputation.

The threats to our reputation and our success are many. It is clear though that the biggest threats come from ourselves, not from outside the industry. That was the number one lesson from 2008 – 2010 years. At least some of us forgot about investing in our reputation and sought only to exploit it in the short term. The New Zealand wine reputation suffered and we all paid a price as a result. 

Vintage 2015 represents another opportunity to add to the reputation of New Zealand wine. Add to it and we will all have the opportunity to benefit from it in the future. Exploit it … and what will be left?

To paraphrase JFK … ‘Ask not what New Zealand wine can do for you – ask what you can do for New Zealand wine.’

Best wishes for the coming festive season. And as a New Year’s resolution … resolve to protect and add to the reputation of New Zealand wine in 2015. 

Cheers 

Steve Green