OPINION: Each week I receive a newsletter called Areopagus, with ‘seven short lessons’ on various historical figures, classical music, paintings, architecture, rhetoric and writing, finishing with a philosophical question. It’s fascinating.

OPINION: The news could not have been more concerning – an industry member deliberately and illegally imported grapevines into New Zealand, and then grew those vines in one of our major winegrowing regions, thereby threatening the livelihoods of friends, neighbours, and colleagues in the industry, and potentially the wider primary sector.

OPINION: In this edition we check out vintage perspectives from around New Zealand, with many reporting lighter than typical yields in a delightfully disease-free harvest.

OPINION: Harvest begins, and almost immediately we start to get media enquiries about how the vintage is going and whether it is going to be a good year for New Zealand wine.

OPINION: Rachael Cook is the smiling grape grower on this month’s cover, tending vines on the miniscule, beautiful and dream-driven vineyard she and her husband Murray have created on an east facing hillside of Marlborough’s Brancott Valley.

OPINION: Drops of God is a mini-series about a large wine inheritance and the civilised battle between a Japanese wine enthusiast, Issei, and a French woman whose nose bleeds when she tastes wine.

OPINION: At 47 years of age Nicholas Paris has achieved far more than most of us hope to in a lifetime.

OPINION: The role primary industries play in New Zealand’s economy has changed dramatically in the past 10 years.