Rockburn expansion

The Cromwell-based winery is to shift its entire production facilities to an existing building, which is one kilometre away from its current (rented) premises.

The new facility was most recently used as a contract winemaking factory for the company South Island Vintners, which no longer exists.

The facility has now been purchased by the owners of Rockburn, which will enable them to produce all of their wines under one roof and also provide future proofing for planned expansion.

"There is about three times' the space there compared to what we have currently, so there is lots of space to grow, which we need," says Rockburn winemaker Malcolm Rees-Francis, who was only able to process 300 of the 400+ tonnes that the winery produced this year. The grapes that he was unable to process, due to lack of space, were fermented at VinPro.

Rockburn began life as Hay's Lake Wines. Its founder, Dunedin cardiothoracic surgeon, Dick Bunton, originally hired Rudi Bauer to make the wine.

It is now owned by Paul Halford and Chris James; Bunton retains a small shareholding in the winery and remains as its chairman.

Rees-Francis anticipates that the winery's move will take place in time for the 2016 vintage, and that it will be staged in an ongoing process.

"It's a big move; we'll need trucks, forklifts and so on. We will have the barrels emptied before we move too, so that's going to put a bit of pressure on because we won't be emptying the barrels until February."

The new facility is already set up as a working winery with Cromwell town water supply, drainage and refrigeration.

"If you were going to build a winery from scratch, it would be harder than it used to be because we are all so much more aware of the environmental repercussions of construction these days.

"Consent processes are much harder to obtain than they used to be, so it's great to have found a facility such as this one." 

Aussie connection doubles Rockburn Riesling

How many New Zealand wineries are able to double their Riesling production?

It's a rare announcement to make, but one which winemaker Rees-Francis is thrilled to talk about now that the winery has a new Australian distributor.

"Our new Australian distributor is supplying people who are very keen on our Tigermoth Riesling and this year we've been getting so many listings of this wine in Australia that we will have to expand the amount that we are making, whereas we still can't sell it in New Zealand," he says.

Annual production of Rockburn Tigermoth Riesling has been capped at 250 cases up until now, but he now plans to add another 100 cases annually, which he expects to be able to do with relative ease.

"We are able to move up to that scale for 2016 and still maintain the style and quality of the wine because we have the fruit available to us."

The Rockburn Tigermoth Riesling is made in a spatlese style, in terms of concentration of flavour, a medium sweet taste (in keeping with the majority of traditional German spatlese styles of riesling) and also at a relatively low alcohol level between 8.4% and 9%, depending on vintage.

"I researched spatlese statistics carefully before describing the style of our wine that way," says Rees-Francis.