Bay Harbour: August 02, 2017

PAGE 14 BAY HARBOUR
Latest Christchurch news at www.star.kiwi
Wednesday August 2 2017
Our People
‘You don’t want to be so large you lose your focus’
•From page 13
What were you doing before
you decided to put grapes in?
I’m a clinical biochemist by
training, so I worked at the
hospital for about 14 years. Ivan
Donaldson was starting up
Pegasus Bay at the time, I also
worked with a gastroenterologist
– Bruce Chapman – and they
own Terrace Edge; they put in
some olives and grapes later on.
So every medical conference
you go to – a lot are overseas
in beautiful places like France,
Switzerland and Germany – then
obviously part in parcel with
that are the evening dinners and
concerts and, of course, they’re
all served with beautiful wine.
You couldn’t not have an interest
in wine.
When did you decide to put in
grapes?
We had about 2ha of land at
Charteris Bay and we had sheep.
We’d gone through the typical
lifestyle block, so we started with
sheep, then we had a goat, and
our daughter had a pony. Then I
thought, why not put vines in?
Did you ever think you would
get to this point where you have
award-winning wines?
Yes and no. The initial reality
was just: Can we grow some good
grapes and produce good wine,
mainly for our own consumption
LOCAL: The grapes for Whistling Buoy’s awardwinning
2015 pinot noir were grown at the Kokolo
site, which overlooks Lyttelton Harbour.
and friends and family? But
certainly, when you produce wine
you want it to be really good,
you don’t want people thinking,
oh, Neil’s bringing out his home
brew again. I didn’t want to
make rubbish wine, we did at
that time contract a really good
winemaker – Grant Whelan
from Kaituna Valley. So basically,
it was good grapes and a really
good winemaker and the rest is
history.
What do your kids do?
Tony is in Coolangatta (Gold
Coast). He’s just set up a pizzeria.
He’s been over there for six
or seven years.
He started off in
Tasmania with a
restaurant called
Restaurant Red,
then he came to
Brisbane and met his partner
and now they’re in Coolangatta.
They are going to have our wine
at the restaurant. Our daughter
Kate is trained as a teacher, and
she’s working at Manuwera
Institute of Technology as a
departmental manager. And our
other son Chris is a winemaker.
He’s now working for Sherwood
Estate in Waipara, I’m wanting
him to take
charge of the half
acre.
So before you
turned your focus
to Whistling Buoy,
where else had you
been working?
After the
hospital, I joined
a biotechnology
company called
Life Technologies,
then I became
chief executive
of Canterbury
Scientific. I resigned
from that a year
ago to focus on
building the brand
and establishing a sales
network for Whistling
Buoy. But I chair the
board of a start up
biotech company called
AuramerBio out of Victoria
University. And I’ve been
doing some consulting work
at Canterbury University for
the Canterbury Development
Corp. I’m just about to start a
job at ChristchurchNZ as its
senior adviser of innovation and
commercialisation.
You mentioned everything is
done by hand. Do you have a bit
of help to pick the grapes?
It’s a social occasion. Here at
Kokolo, the picking, it’s three
consecutive days. We have about
25 people and we fill about 10 big
400kg bins.
I hear your wife Jill does a lot
of maintenance around here?
She has her own mower, she
gets upset if I jump on it. But we
do use sheep up on the vineyard,
I do use the mulching mower, but
we have sheep as well.
Do the sheep damage the
vines at all?
You’ve got to be careful. There’s
nothing on the vines at the
moment so they’ll just chew up
the grass. But during the season,
you don’t want them on bud set,
the only time you really bring
them in is when you want to leaf
pluck so when you’ve got fruit
set, but the berries are really hard
and green. The leaves are green
they will probably have a crack
at one or two bunches but they’ll
think that’s rubbish.
Do you hope to expand
Whistling Buoy?
If we can successfully establish
the brand and get a really good
route to market then, yes, it
would certainly be quite nice
to build it. But there’s a balance
there, too, you don’t want to be so
large you lose your focus. Being
boutique is good.
•Making wine on Banks
Peninsula, pages 10-11
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