A Dream Delayed…

Living in Wellington before we were married, we talked about having land in the Wairarapa.

Not to make wine on. That would be crazy. Neither of us had experience, knowledge, family winemaking pedigree or close friends in the wine folly. Making wine wasn’t even a dream, the prospect being so remote. Wine was something other people made. People who seemed to us to have been born with sacred wine knowledge!

We loved the wild open landscapes and skies of the Wairarapa. The sweep of Palliser Bay and the sense of the South Island beyond and further Antarctica. The hot dry brown summers. The frosty fireside winters. Wind-bent kanuka and pine. Utes and gumboots. The staggering, to us, generosity and hospitality of the cellar doors.

The dream of owning land, was I suppose emblematic of the way young(er) people speak when the prospect of a future together exerts gravity. We meant it though. But we hadn’t arrived at the point where we’d earnt it. It was a genuine desire but we didn’t do it.

Life’s currents swept us along. Careers. A move to Auckland. Family. Auckland enveloped us in its tethers the way cities do but in its own Scyllarian charming ways — the volcanic maunga, wild West Coast beaches, bucolic East Coast bays, the Waitakeres. Nikau, kauri, and pohutukawa. There was culture — High Street. Kingsland. Museums. Then Rocket Park, “Eel Park”, “Dinosaur Park”, the zoo. Burger Burger. The geography of parenting. And friends and family.

One day you look up and the dream has been overwritten by routines of morning rushes, school runs, commutes, play dates and careers that felt increasingly parasitic and ill-fitting.

We were not unhappy.

Neo Life

The life accumulating around us was more than decent. But it wasn’t the one we’d imagined when walking the beach in winter at Lake Ferry.

Our daughters. Five and not-quite-ten at the time, were now our first and last priority. We knew their future would be marked by what we modelled to them. The Auckland version of that model would be a larger house in a better postcode. School fees and overseas holidays. The right car in the right driveway. We understood the game and could probably have continued to play it adequately.

But not convincingly with conviction. Not passionately with satisfaction. If it were just us, I think we’d have kicked for touch and lived that life and been happy.

We wanted to show these wee magnificent people that bigger things were possible and that a life could be chosen with agency rather than accumulated like biddy bids as you pass through. To show them endeavour and a dream pursued.

Red pill. Blue pill.

Tabula Rasa

We knew nothing about practical viticulture. Less about winemaking. When we bought the vineyard at Ōpaki, the plan was to grow fruit and sell it to someone with the sacred knowledge.

The plan lasted approximately 20 percent of one growing season.

A lot goes on in vineyard rows. Physical, repetitive and in certain seasons genuinely brutal work — cold everything over winter pruning, the thorazine shuffle exhaustion of successive nights’ frost-fighting through spring, dawn to dusk netting in midsummer heat. But the work has a quality that office work almost never does: you can see exactly what you’ve done. Zeus willing, the vineyard responds and rewards efforts. The drama, teetering between tragedy and comedy, unfolds in a crescendo across the season. Effort, care, risk and sweat-equity manifests before your eyes rather than in quarterly reports, new mission statements, or annual reviews. Liberated from team building offsites, powerpoints, and management cults. Such relief.

So somewhere in that first growing season, a poison spread up from the vines into our veins. A desire to chase the Pinot Dragon. We started never thinking it an option but as the intoxication of growing wine took hold, we chastised ourselves for not backing ourselves to make wine. Why could we not? What example to our girls is this?

The first vintage was an act of defiance. We had no relationships with the local wine industry to lean on and make wine with so we literally gave away what was pristine fruit to the first takers. Making a small amount only. Utterly gorgeous. A small portion of which is tucked away for some future milestone.

The second vintage was a penance. We knew better what we were doing but the sky father concocted a very difficult growing season. More great wine was made by Caroline who had now qualified as a winemaker. By the third vintage, we took on additional acreage in the local area. We also felt we were coming to know the vineyard beyond textbook knowledge —the way the Tararua Ranges catch rain from the north and west, the way frost flows like a river over land in ebbing waves of cooler then freezing air. How soil yields to the spade in winter and how grasses and seeds pop sequentially like some slow-motion vegetative Vegas water fountain. The way the long hot summers and cold nights slow ripening to produce complexity and balance in taste characteristics.

We were making wine. Our own wine. From our own land. With our own hands.

The dizzy miracle of it has not worn off.

Living on the Edge

The values here are different from the city.

This is a practical observation. In Auckland the currency of status takes precedent: postcode, school, car. Bach location, holiday destination.

Status is the capital of a particular social system, true the world over. Economists talk of agglomeration, the effect of major cities on a country. They hoover up and concentrate resources and wealth thereby stripping cultural and economic opportunity from the regions. Civitas Charybdis. The social capital of these whirlpools is typically performative acquisition; rewarding signifiers of position rather than substance. I once watched Willie Apiata VC, pull up outside a snooty cool kid café in his souped up 4x4. Somehow the presence of this most practical totara of a man in such an effete environment made a near audible clang.

In the country the signals are prosaic. Is your fenceline tidy and wires tight? Is your woodpile in before the cold and wet comes? Do you turn up when a neighbour needs a hand without being asked? Do you do the hard thing properly, or do you cut corners when no one is watching? You leave your muddy boots at the café or supermarket doors here.

We did not expect to find this shift in value systems as clarifying as we did. The values here simplify and strip noise from signal. Of course people here love a good story. But it is what you do that defines you. Such relief.

As we’ve built our wine brand — the way of saying what we’re doing, through labels, through social media and such — we’ve reflected on the values economy we’ve moved to. Being in a rural grower/producer world, farming, we learned PDQ that balance and long-term views are sacrosanct. You don’t exploit. Anything. Not the land or the vines. Not your suppliers. Not those who come to work for you. Well, I do feel I’m exploiting my old Ford 5610 tractor. Ruthlessly to be honest!

Logically, understanding where the limits or edges are helps define what constitutes regenerative and nurturing versus exploitive extraction. True of any negotiation or valuation. And this sense of ‘edge’ keeps coming up for us as we are called to make sense of our new country and wine lives.

‘Edge’ shows up in several ways.

Most obviously, geographically. We’re on the alluvial plain between the Waipoua and Ruamahanga Rivers, 152 metres above sea level, at the northern edge of serious Pinot Noir country.

Then there’s us. Because we’re not industry insiders, with no familial connection to the wine community and no power-ranking in the broader wine industry we’re, by definition, outsiders. Just how we like it. And maybe, maybe we might be ‘doing wine’ a little differently too. Our 500mL bottle is without question a singular call.

Something with consequence, where outcomes are tangible and of our own volition was always the plan. Too show the girls they can dream. Out here on the perimeter there are a skyfull of stars.

Terroir / Turangawaewae / Place

When we moved here, we serendipitously discovered a family history going back to the 1870s Scandinavian settlement in what was to become Mauriceville. The Scandinavian story of the seventy mile bush, is an incredible piece of early NZ history. Search it up. A ‘no English here’ settler policy. A drugs-fiend ship’s doctor. Tragic loss of life on the passage. Quarantine on Somes Island. Left to own their devices upon landing including a two day walk over the Rimutakas to get to future Mauriceville before their Loraxing could begin. These people were Vikings afterall.

Digging further into this history, we discovered an ancestor, George William Jackson. George grew up in Mauriceville in the 1890s. Later as Corporal Jackson he joined the Canterbury Mounted Rifles attached to the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, destined for Egypt. Like too many, he was never to return.

Interestingly, as we researched the Moss Oaks vineyard we leased, located 300m from our Home Fields vineyard, we came to learn that the eponymous 4 oak trees on the property formed part of a greater avenue of trees planted following WWI. A memorial to those who, like George, sacrificed so much.

In addition to George’s story connecting us to this place, only two weeks ago we discovered that a great great great grandfather — Humphry Callister — was among the early settlers who helped establish Carterton in the 1850s. A blood relation, prominent in the founding of the region.

We thought we were choosing a new life. It seems, in a sense, we were also returning. Almost summoned back! We did not expect to inherit this history. And in no sense can we claim anything from it. It is nevertheless a remarkable sequence of revelation and serendipity to have found history waiting here for us. Life eh!

Living Legacy

Our younger daughter came home from school last term with wooden coasters she’d made in class. Cute little circles with laser-burnt markings. She’d determined to put our Home Fields logo on them. And a phrase she’d chosen: The best wine goes here.

The girls resent that this life has cost them holidays and new things and the entertainment and trappings of city life. But they are fully conditioned country kids now. And love tramping, fossicking the rivers. Bonfires. We also know they are proud of what we have achieved with wine. They have a complex relationship with the vineyard – it steals their Dad away in particular. And returns him exhausted, grubby, often smelling of diesel and sulphur. But it turns out, when we ventured the option to sell it, that they are attached to it. Quite fiercely! We’re not allowed to sell it. In fact, they want to live there.

I’d say we’ve been vindicated.

And the wine? Made from 30 plus year-old vines in lean soils at the edge of what this climate can sustain, turned by gritty hard work, accumulated and hard earned knowledge into something beautiful — is, we think, worth the cost.

The best wine goes here.

We believe that too.

Brent

21 July 2026