Anika Willner - growing sustainability and legacy

"I have worked here for five years and live on site, and still every day when I wake up, I think it's incredibly beautiful," says the American winemaker of her "dynamic" surroundings.

And Coat Pit Vineyard - unique, boutique and clearly beloved - has found an extraordinary caretaker in Anika. "I fell like I am part of Coal Pit as much as Coal Pit is part of the land," she says from the Gibbston block, 480 metres above sea level.

Anika was 27 years old, fresh out of Lincoln University postgraduate wine and viticulture studies, when Coal Pit Wines owner Rosie Dunphy offered her a job. Rosie had bought the established vineyard in 2001 while living in Ireland, leveraging her horticulture studies to choose a parcel of land in the foothills of The Remarkables (Kawarau) to grow a family legacy. In 2007 she built an 80-tonne winery on site, going on to name the award winning Tiwha Pinot Noir after her father, while The Heritage collection, including The Harry and The Leo, carry the names of her grandchildren.

Those grandchildren - and their future grandchildren - are front of mind for Anika as she works with the vines and wines of Coal Pit, along with an emerging block of natives. She is determined to be a true steward of the 12-hectare property and its 7ha of vines, named for historic mining at Coal Pit Saddle.

Already a "massive proponent" of organics and regenerative farming, Anika had barely arrived before lobbying for the adoption of both. It was a move that made perfect sense to her, both for the environment and for the wines, given the extremely nutrient rich soils on wht was an old rams' paddock long before it was vineyard.

The vines needed increased competition to ensure their balance, so Anika "bumped up the biodiversity", planting more than 20 mid row edible cover crops, including kale, spinach, turnips, radishes, legumes and flowers, along with the sunflowers she adores. Her initial plan was to provide a perpetual organic garden for the vineyard crew to harvest from over the summer and autumn, but with nets going on and vintage progressing, the second harvest proved impractical. By the time the mid row crop was available for picking, most of the team had left, "and I don't need 10,000 radishes", she laughs.

But the abundance of leafy greens served a valuable purpose, helping retain soil moisture on the largely dry-farmed block, as tractors crimped the live plants down. Then, when Anika and others had picked as much salad as they could handle, the Coal Pit sheep flock came in to graze and fertilise the land, in what she sees as a happy closed-circuit system.

It's all a long way from a childhood in Ohio, far from United States wine regions. While studying at Ohio State University, Anika and a friend started The Ohio State Wine Club, at first in living rooms and then on a bigger scale after gaining funding from the university. By the time she finished her undergraduate degree, the club had 400 members and frequent visits from wine experts, her friend was off to UC Davis to study winemaking, and Anika was planning her first vintage in South Africa.

That three-month baptism by fire, with its painfully long hours, remains her toughest vintage yet. But it fuelled her passion for the industry, revealing the blend of creativity and science behind winemaking. "There was something about working with my hands I really loved." Her next vintage was at Wither Hills in Marlborough in 2016, where she met her partner Ben Tombs (Tonnellerie de Mercurey New Zealand Young Winemaker of the Year 2020). During the next few years they worked and travelled in Europe, Australia, and America, soaking up knowledge in every wine region. After a Tasmanian vintage with a premium Pinot Noir producer, and subsequent studies at Lincoln, Anika joined Coal Pit in 2018, delighted to merge her passions for Pinot and nature in an area she finds intense and inspiring.

Rosie cultivates that connection, offering the winemaker autonomy to follow her passions. "They really trust me to do what I think is the best for the wine and that is really trying to express the site and the terroir." And it seems a trust well placed, with one of Anika's very first wines - the 2018 'Tiwha' Pinot Noir - going on to win the Sustainable Trophy and the New Zealand Red Trophy at the 2020 International Wine Challenge.

Coal Pit will be certified organic with BioGro this year, and Anik continues to grow sustainability, while deepening the connection to terroir. That includes a 3ha native planting in a paddock that runs parallel to the vineyard, in collaboration with Neill Sampson from the Whakatipu Reforestation Trust (wrtqt.org.nz). With 400 trees planted by family and friends last year, and another 500 to go in this year, the plantation is likely to be certified for carbon sequestration in the future, as well as providing increased biodiversity in the vineyard and a beautiful enclave for the family. It's a big project for such a small producer, but like many of her ambitions, it is about ensuring sustainability for the long term, says Anika. "I don't mean 20 years; I mean 100 or 200 years."

She occasionally wonders whether she would have been given the role at Coal Pit at such a young age if the owner was not a woman, and adept at "breaking boundaries". Rosie has a lot of confidence in herself and who she chooses to support the business, says Anika. "But she also strongly believes women can do anything." The winemaker would like to see a greater diversity in the wine industry, and particularly diversity in the wine industry, and particularly in nurturing the development of people from indigenous cultures, harnessing a generational connection to the land and its cycles, and a deep understanding of stewardship.

For Anika, working and living at Coal Pit allows her to dig in to a job she is "obsessed" with. "It is my life."