Getting on top of things again…

What a great feeling it is to have the pruning all done and dusted for another year.  We finished cutting, stripping and tying down (went through almost 10 000 ties) the last of our vines a week or so ago.  Our sincere thanks go out again to those who pitched in and gave us a hand when morale began to fail …somewhere around vine 3899 with a cold southerly blowing the ties from your pouch and rain falling yet again.  To Grandpop Noel, to my wonderful friend Sarah, to the ever energetic Geoff and to Emilien the friendly froggie…your hard work and great company were so appreciated.  It always amazes me that there are people out there who are happy to lend a hand when there’s nothing in it for them and no great cause, other than to help out a mate.    Thanks to our kids too for helping out and putting up with weekend after weekend of boredom, or as in Archie’s case – time spent mastering his walking up and down the rows.  However, it hasn’t been all bad – there were some beautiful days out in the vineyard where I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else.  Dad has Dexter cows in the paddock next door and three baby calves were born as we pruned!  And while there’s been crappy weather too – it’s not like we’ve been in Christchurch.  Our heart goes out to all the Cantabs and if any of you need a break from the shaky city, let us know as there’s always room around here for extras. What else can I say other than, may your next fiasco be a wine! 

Speaking of the earthquake, we experienced our own firsthand consequence of the quake earlier this week when we bottled our 2010 wines.  There was a delay in getting the labels here from Christchurch which meant we had to bottle the wine without them – labels are over-rated anyway aren’t they, isn’t consumer choice all about cost at the end of the day?  There are details on the label though that legally must be displayed so alas we will put the cleanskins (naked wine bottles)  back through the bottling line on Tuesday to get labelled.  Ironically we had the name “Shaky Isles Wines” trademarked before deciding to go with Fiasco.  I guess both are somewhat appropriate give the state of Christchurch.

I suspect everyone is now ready for the Spring to arrive.  The buds on our vines haven’t burst yet and it’s always a bit of fun predicting when they will.    Although it is September, when you make wine it feels like this is the start of the year – when there is new growth and the whole cycle starts again.  Happy New Year all

Coming out of the vintage haze…

Well I’ve reached an all time low in blogging efforts – almost down to one a month!  The months of March, April and May are always very busy for us as Aaron works fulltime for Indevin (an independent wine making company) and his hours are long.  As a consequence we feel like we are the bloke on our logo – running on a  moving wine barrel, only we need to get that wine glass back in hand!    We have discovered that having your own wine label means there are never-ending tasks to do -  contract growers can pause and celebrate the fact the their fruit is harvested and a cheque from the wine company is on the way, however we have a much longer road ahead.    At the moment our focus is on making the wine and getting labels and bottling sorted, pruning is just around the corner and sales and marketing need to be constantly worked on.  

On the upside we are going to Brisbane soon to meet our distributor there and see how sales are going…tax deductible Gold Coast – I knew there had to be some perks!   It’s great exporting to Australia because for us there is a lot less labour shipping in bulk than marketing and selling small volumes via multiple outlets here in NZ.  There is also the advantage of being able to claim back the WET tax.  ‘Wet’ seems a funny name for a tax, especially for a drink – but it actually stands for Wine Equalisation Tax.  In 2000 the Australian government added this 29% tax to its wine and when wine producers there went mad they decided that producers could claim this tax back for their first million dollars worth of wine sold each year.  This ability to claim it back was later extended to New Zealand wine producers.

We also need to visit Auckland again soon to touch base with the outlets selling Fiasco there.  We have recently added our wine to the menu list at The Falls - an awesome cafe/restaurant in West Auckland.  We had an all day brunch there at the end of last year and I can personally vouch for the high standard of service from Allan and his team (five stars from me and I don’t do that often!).  Aside from tax deductible travel, the other main advantage of having your own label is the buzz of tasting and sharing an end-product that you have produced.  One of our Sauvignon Blanc ferments finished today so will soon be filtered, bottled and on its way to the shop shelves.  It is tasting beautiful at this stage –  Aaron tells me it will be our best yet.  I’ll let you know when I’ve tried it – am sure women have far superior taste buds to men.

Injury fiasco to kick off vintage

Aaron is now on night shift…got a text from him Saturday night saying:

 ”At hos hurt hand got 11 stitches, may need skin graft, all good tho, dont panic.”

He is of course aware that I’m prone to panic when anyone gets injured!  Anyway turns out he managed to take off a chunk of skin at the base of his thumb while in the process of showing the new vintage staff how to change a filter.  It’s all stitched up now…not quite Aaron’s idea of getting sewn up on a Saturday night but mending well.  

I thought he might of had some time off but it was straight back from hospital to the winery (I still blame Buck Shelford … Aaron has long been in awe of his continuing to play rugby with a torn scrotum!).   There is a real commitment to hard work over vintage that I havent seen in many other industries.  People will put everything aside and work their guts out.  They will work through the night, they will not take a day off for over a month and they will work 100 hour weeks if necessary.  Many staff are on salaries so there’s not even the incentive of extra large pay packets for all those long hours.  There is an understanding that it is only for about six weeks, that the job must be done and that it’s just part of life in the wine industry.  I am often amazed that in these days of the rights of the individual that no-one complains or that a union of some sort hasn’t evolved.   I’m guessing it might be different if the industry were city based but here in Marlborough there are still bloody hard workers who put the needs of the businesses they work for before their own.

On a ship bound for Australia …

We are increasingly selling our wine in Australia.  Prior to setting up Fiasco Wines neither Aaron & I had exported anything (except ourselves on our big OE…that incidently turned into a big TUM-E …a fiasco for another post perhaps!) sooooo exporting our wine has been a steep learning curve.  It has also surprised me how satisfying it has been.  Firstly there is knowing that you are actually bringing money into the New Zealand economy for the good of all and secondly, it’s intriguing to think of the fruit from our backyard being swirled around in the glass of a Queenslander many miles away. 

Our wine is being distributed in Australia by Mark Lawson of the Fluid Liquor group, and is mainly being sold in Brisbane restaurants.  For any  & Sunshine coast  locals/visitors reading this, it’s available at BottlO’Brien’s Liquor Store, at Cafe Arabica, at Hyatt Regency Coolum, at the Jordaan Restaurant & Bar, Rhapsody Cafe & Restaurant, River Deck, That Thai Restaurant and soon to be released at a chain of pizza/pasta restaurants. 

I can’t wait to visit Australia next year and wander into one of these places – will be quite a buzz.  The cool thing is that consumers too can use the internet to link straight from the web address on the bottle to this blog and find out exactly where their wine has come from and who has been involved in making it etc.   We hope to go and meet some of our Australian customers next year.  Our daughter Tahlia was born in Alice Springs too so we have always promised her a return visit so she can check out the place of her arrival into the world.

But for now its just the wine headed for Oz, departing on a ship from Lyttleton tomorrow

Vessel:        MSC Santhya 949
ETD:        03/12
ETA:        20/12

Here’s hoping the seas are smooth and there are no fiascos along the way

2009 wine is bottled!

Well we are now officially out of 2008 stock and our 2009 wine is bottled and on the shop shelves.  It is a relief to put our first year behind us after coming up against a recession and an oversupply of wine in the market. 

We are stoked with how our ’09′ wines are tasting -  and of course we aren’t bias .  But then we had expert assistant winemakers – a whoppa thanks to all of you who took part in the blend. 

The big new one for us is our NASA Sauvignon Blanc – No Added Sulfur Around.  It’s summed up by the blurb on the back of the bottle:

“Sometimes we get crazy ideas while we wait around for our beautiful Fiasco fruit to ripen.   How about making a wine without throwing in any of the usual additives and preservatives?  Simply harvest the fruit, coax out the juice, ferment it with yeast, lightly filter, and bottle.  The idea appeared radical but with good clean fruit and careful wine making we knew we could give it a blast.  And so the NASA concept took off –No Added Sulfur Around!  We must confess though – this bottle does contain small amounts of sulphites but only because the wild yeast that arrived in our juice love to produce them naturally.  And we should probably warn you that in time your NASA may form a small amount of sediment -don’t worry its harmless! ”

Reflecting back on this time last year, it’s exciting and encouraging to now have some wine outlets approaching us  – instead of rejecting our approaches – understandably as a then unknown new label.  We still have plenty of work to do in getting our Fiasco name out there – but we are making progress and each little step forward is great for the ole motivation.  It is actually quite scary when you stand in the bottling company watching thousands of bottles come off the bottling line – it’s hard not to have moments of panic and thoughts of -  “Crikey can we sell all this?!”  But this time around we have a steady flow of orders and we are ever grateful to all of you who buy our end product – it’s immensely rewarding  to see our year’s work bottled and a real buzz to know it’s being enjoyed by folk all over NZ and increasingly Australia.   Cheers all!

‘Full on’

One of the reasons we went with the name ‘Fiasco Wines’ is that we wanted something that reflected the action and vibrancy of making wine in Marlborough.  A ‘place name’ label  just seemed too sedentary to do justice to the reality. 

Before gaining first hand knowledge of the industry here, when thinking of winemaking I’d get pictures in my head of  little vineyards on hillsides, people carrying grapes in baskets and a wrinkled old man fluffing around over old barrels doing tastings.  I guess this was based on what I’d heard of Old World winemaking and it all seemed pretty slow paced and somewhat romantic.  But the reality couldn’t be more different.  There is state of the art technology; a myriad of different types of people working in the industry and the year just flies by with all that needs doing.  Harvesting the grapes is all action, with harvesters and wineries operating 24 hours a day throughout March, April and May.  Then there are a massive number of hectares needing pruning and hundreds of workers brought in from overseas to cope with the workload – so June to August is all go.  Then the new spring buds burst in September and frost fighting starts - with frost a very real risk until November.   There is some amazing technology involved in this and those on the job are often up half the night checking data and making the tough decisions on what action to take – helicopters and wind fans are not cheap and their noise causes a stir with the locals.  This time of year is also time to bottle and label the 2009 wines.  Ours are being bottled later this month.  The end of the year is busy for sales – with all the social events that come with Christmas, summer and general celebrations.  So I suggested to Aaron that early 2010 we should have a chance to have a breather and a Fiasco Wines party in the old woolshed on the vineyard.  “Sure,” said Aaron but don’t forget we’ll only be 8 weeks or so from harvest then!

Fiasco and a Big Mac!

 

You know you’ve made it to the top when your wine is matched with a Big Mac - would have been seriously gutted if we’d been matched to a cheap ol cheeseburger! 

But seriously, why not enjoy a great wine with a takeaway treat?  Loved that good down to earth piece Jayson and thanks for the mention  :-)

New Wine

It’s not long now until we bottle our 2009 Sauvignons and Gewurztraminer.  We have about 1/8 of last year’s vintage left to sell, which we are pleased about.  There is actually more to sales management than meets the eye as the challenge is to sell the stock steadily, not simply to sell the stock.  While it’s tempting to get it all sold quickly, it’s no good for the business reputation to then have to tell customers you have no wine for the remainder of the year.   So we have had to be careful about which deals to pursue while at the same time being careful to keep the sales moving.  

We have kept our Pinot Noir out of supermarkets as we have less of it and it cellars well.  Some wine companies haven’t even released their ’08′ Pinots yet, preferring to let them age to a better taste.  So we will continue to sell our ’08′  Black Pearl next year and beyond.  In fact, there is no reason that we can’t also keep selling our 2008 Sav, and we actually think it tastes better now than it did last year BUT consumers do seem to have a incorrect perception that Sauvignon Blanc must be drunk fairly quickly.  Sure, these whites don’t last as long as reds but Sav does in fact cellar well for 2 – 3 years and does mature and change. 

Some wineries have rushed their 2009 Savs out to meet the public demand for ‘new’ and ‘fresh.’  And I guess it’s not a bad move for lower end wines that make their money through a low cost, high sales volume approach.

My advice to wine drinkers out there would be that good things take time and also to enjoy the bargains as liquor outlets feel the need to clear out the ‘old’  ’08′ wine which is actually still far from its use by date.

Foreign Ownership

Peter Saunders wrote a good article in this month’s Wine Technology magazine about overseas ownership of New Zealand wine.   It included the following info:

USA’s Constellation group own:  Nobilo, Kim Crawford, Selaks, Drylands, Monkey Bay, Station Road, Bach 22, White Cloud.  Fosters in Australia own Matua Valley, Shingle Peak and Secret Stone; France’s Louis Vuitton owns Cloudy Bay and the French also, through Pernod Ricard, own Montana, Corbans, Stoneleigh, Deutz Marlborough, Church Rd, Lindauer and Five flax.  An Australian company named Yalumba own Nautilus, Twin Islands and Opawa while a Portugese outfit own Framingham wines.  The Peabody family in France own Craggy Range and so the list goes on (I’ve only picked some to share with you).

I don’t know whether consumers are aware of who owns the wine they drink or whether they care.  I don’t know whether folk are grateful for the involvement of foreigners or whether they resent it.  Foreign investment can certainly  be a saviour for wine companies – providing not just the funds for a business to grow but often also expertise and very valuable distribution channels.  On the down side it means that profits often end up out of Godzone.  But is this a small price to pay if it means the business thrives and New Zealanders keep jobs?  Or is it selling out – do we need to have more self confidence and hold onto the reigns no matter how rough the ride may get at times?  Or does it depend what country is involved – is it just too much to stomach those Aussies  taking the profits?   ;-)  (no offence intended, our daughter was born in Alice Springs and is an Australian citizen!)  

Lots of questions that I don’t have the answers to  – but I’d be interested to hear your views.

Oh, and before you start wondering, no I’m not gearing up to defend a sale of Fiasco to an overseas buyer – we have no intention of doing that nor even getting big enough to be of interest to such buyers.  But um, feel free to present all offers around the “Trade Me’ mark…;-)

New or old wineskins?

 

“And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine desires new wine, but says, “The old is good.” ’NRSV

Since biblical times, humankind has found change challenging.  The above verse from Luke is generally interpreted as a metaphor for Christianity itself – a new message that wont fit with the old.  But the question of how to integrate the new with the old spans across multiple areas…

One of the challenges with wine is finding the balance between old and new ways of doing things – there is a real tension between:

Tradition and innovation - there is something appealing about the cork but hey screw caps save having to throw out musty, corked wine and are so much easier to put back on the bottle in the fridge!

 Romance and practicality – hand picking and feet stomping of grapes in the late autumn sun is all very well but a machine can harvest much more efficiently.

‘Natural’ versus technological – we could treat the wine with less additives, but  are we OK with murky,unfiltered wine?

Our ideals and what we actually do - why not hand weed between the rows instead of using big vehicles that pump out greenhouse gases…but ohh the labour   :-(

It’s not a matter of throwing out all the old ways of doing things and replacing them with newer, superior methods, but rather finding the right place along the continuum.   It is not easy deciding what is worth retaining and what needs replacing.  At Fiasco for example we love to embrace new technologies, including using the internet for our marketing.  At the same time however, we are experimenting with wines that are made in a way done a long time ago – more naturally with wild yeasts and less additives/processing. 

I suspect that in recent times, in areas not limited to winemaking, there has been a movement back to basics, back a little on the continuum.  People seem to be saying: “Hey, wait a minute, back up the bus – lets take a look at the old way, there may be some value in that.”  I guess the recession has played a part in this move.   Tough times forced us to do things the way grandma did and interestingly a recent survey found that many of us actually found these changes to be a positive thing (sorry I can’t source that survey, heard it mentioned on the tele a couple of days ago). 

  I was aware of it when I had my son Archie, 7 weeks ago at Wairau hospital here in Blenheim.  The protocol had changed since I had Finn, over seven years ago.  Immediately after the birth, Archie was placed on me for skin to skin contact for an uninterrupted hour.  No whisking the baby away for weighing or cleaning up.  In fact bathing the baby didn’t happen until a couple of days later.  The idea is that this will help with mother child bonding and with the early establishment of breast feeding.   Demand feeding is also encouraged, again a move back to how things were done a long time ago when instinct was more highly valued.

But its not as simple as just going back to the old way of doing things.  Rather we need to take the time to evaluate everything we do at Fiasco to determine the very best way of making and selling our product.  Sometimes change can be fantastic.  Many of you have probably seen the clip below, but it does make the point that tradition for tradition’s sake can be just as stifling as innovation for innovation’s sake

P.S  By the way, over on facebook we are giving away free wine this Saturday – check out our fan page and be in to win.