Making the premium market pay

Kiwis don’t like heights, Mike Spratt suggests. Which is another way of saying that the New Zealand wine industry hasn’t positioned itself offshore as a premium producer because the Kiwi psyche contains a broad streak of egalitarianism that provokes us into tearing down tall poppies.

Spratt, on the other hand, is founder of Destiny Bay Wines, which produces some of the most expensive wine in the country, ranging from $70 to $270 a bottle.

These days his son Sean is responsible for the wine, from grape to bottle, leaving Mike and his wife, Ann, to “concentrate on the fun things about the label”.

These include forming an alliance with four other New Zealand ultrapremium wine producers in a new marketing group called The Specialist Winegrowers of New Zealand (TSWNZ).

The other producers are No 1 Family Estate, Vinoptima, Hay Paddock and Wooing Tree Vineyards.

The thing they have in common, apart from producing expensive wines, is that each specialises in a single style or grape variety.

Destiny Bay Wines produces Bordeaux-type reds; Nick Nobilo at Vinoptima is intent on making the world’s greatest gewurztraminer, as is Chris Canning at The Hay Paddock, and likewise with Waiheke syrah, Wooing Tree with Central Otago pinot noir, and Adele and Daniel Le Brun at No 1 Family Estate with methode traditionelle.

It is a marketing alliance aimed at strength in numbers when selling wine offshore, and built on a shared singular obsession that Nobilo describes as a level of dedication that borders on the obsessive.

Spratt calls it a mild form of insanity.

And when it comes to marketing, Spratt and Chris Canning reckon most New Zealand wine producers get it wrong.

Spratt unleashed two broadsides in recent issues of New Zealand Winegrower, called “Are we destroying our brand?” and “Reinventing the New Zealand wine brand”.

It’s all about recognising that New Zealand’s wine production is just a blot on the landscape globally – less than 1% of total global production.

What worries Spratt, Canning and others is that the huge vintage of 2008 led to cost-cutting of New Zealand wine offshore and the risk that we will become, like Australia, known as a volume producer of cheap wine.

Villa Maria’s George Fistonich and others have urged more work in the vineyard to restrict the volume of grapes produced by vines per hectare. Spratt and Canning reckon we need to place more value on the wine we do produce.

“Despite producing less than 1% of the world’s wine, New Zealand wine producers believe there is a glut. They have dramatically discounted their prices, increased bulk wine sales five-fold and called for vineyards to be scrapped and compulsory caps to be placed on production, at the same time boasting that export sales have now topped the billion-dollar mark,” Chris Canning said in a statement put out by TSWNZ this year.