Growing Legacy: Holly Girven Russell

Until I was 32, my father was the head winemaker at Esk Valley Estate. The family home was situated between the winery and the ocean. If we looked east out the front door, we saw the Pacific, if we looked west over the back garden and past the railway lines, we saw Dad’s beloved Terraces vineyard and the sprawling winery nestled into the valley beside it. We referred to the winery as ‘Work’ – a noun and not a verb, as Dad taught us very young: if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.

My younger sister, Bobby, and I took any opportunity to go to Work. Sue Cranswick who ran the tasting room was a fairy godmother figure to us, she’d let us treat her domain as a playground; wood wool as our sandpit, wine show trophies our figurines, the stairs to the old steeple our climbing frame. As we got older, to the chagrin of cellar master Steve Sykes, the barrel halls became our playground; chocks our building blocks, stillaged barrels our jungle gym, pre-mechanical concrete conveyors our slides. In our tweens, the wife of Assistant Winemaker Darryl Brooker became our babysitter and we’d spend hours in the old winery villa their growing family occupied. In our teens, we preferred the lab and the office – where the computers were. We’d take residence at any spare computer (and knew everyone’s passwords) to tap away at Minesweeper or Neopets, completely oblivious to anything happening in the winery around us. It was Work, it felt like home.

At high school, with dad’s help, I entered the Year 9 Science Fair with a project investigating ‘The Impact of Yeast Strain on Bay View Chardonnay’. The results were inconclusive and the project ultimately deemed unsuitable for a 13-year-old, but the seeds of interest in the magic of winemaking were being sown; they would take a decade to flower.

I went on to university to study geography; my relationship with wine devolved and the only thing I considered was whether warm $8 red wine was tastier than warm $8 white wine. After graduation I worked in hospitality and found some focus; it was 2013 in Wellington and craft beer got its hooks in me. I’d earn $16 an hour and traipse down to the Malthouse to spend $16 on a Delirium Tremens, convinced there was nothing more delicious or chic in the entire world.

Conversations with Dad became more fascinating (to us both, I’m sure) and his visits to Wellington shifted from him hosting the sullen hungover daughter at brunch, to spending evenings at craft beer bars. With my new hospitality friends expecting me to be a font of wine knowledge given my upbringing, I finally decided it was time to Learn About Wine. Dad sent me to Regional Wines and Geoff Kelly’s blind tastings had me hooked.

Now working in a government call centre - a rite of passage for any wayward Victoria graduate in 2014 – I was calculating my next move; it was time to go to London and work in the wine industry. I applied for anything wine-related; after bombing an interview with Pol Roger (I pronounced it as written), I charmed the crew at Marks and Spencer and took a job in the wine buying team as their analyst. For an ambitious 23-year-old, this was a golden ticket to the wine industry; I tasted widely, observed every deal, developed a palate, and quickly became fluent in winespeak.

When my two-year visa expired, the only logical move was into winemaking – I’d seen the production and craft side at home and during my M&S tenure had been involved with the technical and commercial side. Both fascinated me, and I wasn’t sure where I’d land but knew I needed to get my hands dirty and find out. I enrolled in the postgraduate wine science programme at Auckland University and moved from East London to Waiheke Island for a year of study in 2017.

For my first harvest off the rock, I was determined to get a job on my own merit, so I applied widely and left my surname off my CV. I scored a role at Elephant Hill under Steve Skinner and loved it so much I returned in 2019 and 2021. By this point, Esk Valley was no longer operating from the winery I grew up in, but was housed in a large production facility in Twyford; a place that didn’t seem natural for Dad and didn’t entice me to join him. Elephant Hill gave me the Esk experience; days spent between vineyard and winery, involved at every stage of production, meticulous attention to detail, and harvest teams that have become family (and business partners). During these stints, I’d stay with my parents so every evening was filled with Dad and I discussing our respective days of harvesting, comparing vineyard and ferment notes, and at last all his knowledge was accessible to me.

After a miserable harvest in Southern Ontario in 2019, I returned to Hawke’s Bay and reconnected with an old school friend whose family vineyard in Maraekakoho had fallen out of production. That conversation, coupled with an inspiring 2020 Yarra Valley harvest with Mac Forbes, and a global pandemic, ultimately became the wine brand Three Fates.

The 2025 vintage marks the end of Three Fates, after a five-vintage run that changed our lives and solidified my love for making wine. Our journey has come to a natural conclusion and one that we intend to celebrate heartily in coming months. For myself, this means stepping a careful toe out into something even more personal, with Dad at my side. In 2026, we harvested two tonnes of Two Terraces Chenin Blanc and made a wine together – watch this space.

Ours isn’t the fabled story of landed gentry and a multi-generation wine estate. We don’t have a homestead to preserve, a family brand to inherit, a sprawling vineyard, or own anything much beyond a recently mortgage-free quarter-acre bach-turned-house in the shadow of the winery Dad ran for 35 years. What we have instead is a shared obsession, curiosity, and love for preserving a place and season in a bottle. My father is the son of a teacher and a paint salesman from Feilding. I am the daughter of a winemaker and a chef-turned-office manager. Wine was never an inheritance; it was a choice.

As I write this, a child grows in my belly. Whether they choose to pursue wine or not is entirely up to them. But I hope they grow up understanding what I learnt from Dad: to care deeply about craftsmanship, to stay openminded and adaptable, to pursue quality and do things properly, and to look after the people you work alongside. To follow the seasons rather than fight them, to share food and wine generously, and to always make space for a little hedonism along the way.

If they become a third-generation wine fanatic, well, I get it.