Women in Wine: Jess Wilson
In the acknowledgements section of her Kellogg Rural Leadership Programme report, Jess Wilson thanks those who’ve supported her many endeavours. “Even when I say, ‘this is the last one’ when invariably it never is.”
“When I first moved there, I thought all the big tanks were full of milk! That’s how ignorant I was.”
An affable Swiss woman changed all that, delivering her from dairy confusion to irrevocable wine intrigue. Ashleigh had been busy utilising her marketing degree at a Wellington ad agency when she came into the orbit of Therese Herzog, co-founder of Hans Herzog Estate in Marlborough.
Therese was visiting the capital for the weekend and on the lookout for someone to help her (and winemaker husband Hans) with sales and marketing. Over a three-and-a-half-hour lunch, Swiss charisma prevailed, and Ashleigh accepted an invitation south to see the Herzog operation. “I just fell in love with the place and decided to move there. It was all a beautiful accident.”
Now a winemaker with her own label – Siren Wines – Ashleigh says couldn’t have wished for a better introduction to the industry. The Herzogs encouraged her to stray past the marketing desk and offered to put her through her Wine and Spirit Education Trust studies. This paved the way for a degree in viticulture and winemaking at Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology. “Hans and Therese were so generous with their knowledge and had such lovely staff – the atmosphere was infectious,” says Ashleigh. “It was all so exciting and new to me and I just wanted to learn about everything. It was really hands-on, so even if you were working in the office you’d get to see everything from vine to wine. You couldn’t help but go down that rabbit hole.”
This makes it all sound like some gravitational accident, but rabbit holes only tend to claim those with deeply curious natures. “I joke that I’ll do anything for a story. My parents always used to say that I was just a bit of a searcher. They’ve both passed away now so I’ve got a deeper appreciation that life is so short. If there’s something that interests me, I have to seize that opportunity and roll with it. I just want to experience as much as I can.”
Ashleigh spotted her next opportunity – French winemaker Jean-Jacque (‘JJ’) Morel – at an event in Sydney. “He was this cool looking guy with a long grey ponytail and leather pants. I thought, ‘that wine’s going to be good’. The following year I spent six weeks learning from him at his winery in Burgundy, France.”
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Ashleigh Barrowman |
She was in a bit of a wine hurry at this stage. “I was 25 when I got into the industry – I thought I was late to the game and I wanted to learn as much as possible as soon as possible. So I started doing back-to-back vintages pretty soon after I finished studying.”
While in Burgundy, she wrote to other organic winemakers she was interested in. “I wanted to learn from those I admired – people whose wines I’d tried or read about; people I wanted to spend time with and get to know on a professional and personal level.”
Read More:
- Women in Wine: Jess Wilson
- Women in Wine: Progress and leadership in New Zealand's wine industry
- Women in Wine: Emma Taylor
This self-curated internship saw her learn from winemaker heroes at Vino di Anna in Sicily, Italy; Les Bottes Rouges and Domaine Labet in the Jura, France; and Patrick Sullivan in Gippsland, Australia.
When Covid shutdowns thwarted further overseas wandering, Ashleigh decided to finesse her pruning skills. She’d heard there was an impressive vigneron (Jeremy Hyland, “aka: grape wizard”) at The Wrekin Vineyard – a biodynamically farmed site in Marlborough. So she followed her nose there to gain viticultural smarts – and got herself all Wrekin-smitten in the process. “I fell in love with the place – and, again, the people. I asked if I could bring my dog with me every day and they said, ‘yes, absolutely’. I thought, ‘OK, that seals the deal’. After pruning there I didn’t want to leave. I decided it was time to start making my own wine and I wanted to see what I could do with The Wrekin fruit.”
Ashleigh started producing wine under her own label in 2020. She makes single-vineyard, single-varietal wines from Chardonnay, Chenin Blanc, and Pinot Noir and likes the restriction this trio imposes on her. “It gives me creative license to try new things and push the boundaries to see what the fruit can do. I’ve experimented with about nine different cuvées and I’m doing a couple of méthode traditionnelle, a skin-contact Chardonnay and a Chardonnay
sous voile.”
She’s decidedly low-fi in her approach and says some of her Wrekin kin were intrigued by what she calls her ‘Luddite methods’ – mostly, her practise of patiently plucking the fruit sans machinery. “I’d seen winemakers in Europe do their destemming by hand using a metre-by-metre piece of wood with a lot of holes in it. It’s a really gentle process but it’s also extremely labour intensive – it takes me a few hours to do what a machine can do in five minutes.”
All the producers who source their fruit from The Wrekin gather twice a year to do a red and white tasting. “We taste them blind and talk about it and then it’s revealed whose wine it is. The personalities of winemakers come through. I’ve been told mine are the most gentle wines.”
Which is to say, she’s more your kindly grape midwife than strict wine overlord. She likes her wines wild-fermented, unfined, and unfiltered, with minimal sulphites. For Ashleigh, it’s all about bottling snapshots of a time and place. “I’m not a helicopter winemaker. I step in only if there’s a real risk of fault. It’s harder to do less but ultimately more rewarding. If you start to meddle with it too much you lose the personality of the wine. It can become a bit too sterile and lack personality.”
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Ashleigh Barrowman. |
It’s not easy to be so hands off. “You can’t help but get nervous about ferments and the volatile acidity. I don’t often look at the numbers – I’m more focused on the taste of the fruit. So, I just have to hold my breath and hope it’ll work out.”
Ashleigh crafts her wine at The Coterie – a winemaking collective in Marlborough. She says the collegiallity at this hub provides the perfect counterpoint to her one-woman Siren Wines operation. It also helps with the tricky business of holding her winemaking nerve. “It’s great to have some real technical winemakers at hand – like David Foes and Tom Hindmarsh. They’re reassuring because they know the style I’m working with and the path I want to go down.”
As for the future, Ashleigh has no set agenda. “I dont have a five or 10-year plan – that would be off-brand! I used to dream about having my own vineyard but the crew at The Wrekin are so special to me that even if I did have my own grapes, I’d really miss those people. If ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
So for now, Ashleigh is happy de-stemming her fruit and perfecting the cellar art of benign grape neglect – until the next Barrowman-beckoning rabbit hole causes some sort of new “beautiful accident”.
