Vin de Te Teko

By Daniel Pilkington, April 11, 2007 @ 11 pm

Riversun’s Geoff Thorpe and Martine Korban nurse our emerging wines. Idealog March/April 2007, page 22. Photograph by Graeme Murray

An abandoned GE containment building is put to new use—and our wine industry has reason to be grateful

If not for a little experiment in the early 70s involving an untried grape variety in a new, untested viticultural region, Kiwi winemakers could still be fooling around with Müller-Thurgau.

Raise a glass, then, to Marlborough and the Sauvignon Blanc grape. But consider this: without new varieties for winemakers to work their magic on, our wine industry could stagnate in its fast-paced, trend-based market. Which is the dilemma it faced in the late 90s when the government closed New Zealand’s only quarantine   facility capable of processing grapevine imports.

Now, however, Gisborne-based Riversun Nursery has opened its own quarantine facility and started importing new high-quality vines from some of the world’s greatest winegrowing regions—South America, Australia, Canada, California, Austria, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Germany. Riversun executive director Geoff Thorpe says quality new vines are vital for the local industry to maintain its creative edge. “We wanted to take the quality of genetic material we delivered out onto vineyards to a whole other level,” he says. “We wanted to be able to deliver the highest-quality grafted grapevines in the world, and to be able to prove it.”

The company is also intent on nurturing some emerging industries that might be inspired by our wine success; for example, Riversun is planning to import a range of high-quality avocado crops.

The facility, in Te Teko, Bay of Plenty, was originally built for GE containment but the GE moratorium left it surplus to requirements. Quarantine facilities, however, don’t make money quickly. After a multimillion-dollar investment in setup costs and $300,000 per year in running expenses, Riversun is yet to recoup anything—and it could be years before the company sees any solid returns, Thorpe says.

After the material arrives it takes two years to process through quarantine, and a further two years to bulk-up and graft the supplies. Then the company begin offering their products to the market—but it takes three to four years to plant a vineyard and most clients, says Thorpe, will only plant a small trial vineyard to begin with. If that’s a success, a commercial-sized vineyard will follow. So it takes more than a decade after importation before the company can sell their products at commercial volumes.

But Riversun isn’t looking for a short-term return. “New Zealand has always had to position itself at the premium end of the market,” Thorpe says. “And historically we’ve done a good job of targeting this high-quality niche. But although New Zealand has a good place in the market, we need to keep striving to improve and evolve.”