At Babich, we’re so sustainably minded that we even recycle our vineyards!

One of the places we’re doing this at the moment is at Fernhill in Hawke’s Bay, where we’re replacing some old vines with more and better new ones.

This part of Fernhill has proven its ability to produce fine Chardonnay, and we’re sticking with this variety, only changing from Clone 6 to the superior Clone 548. This clone is known for its quality, usually producing small and somewhat loose bunches. Having this available will give our winemakers more tools to work with for future blends.

At the same time, we’re changing the planting pattern from the old-style wide rows to the more modern 2.5m spacing. We’re also planting the new vines slightly closer together within each row. With more vines in the ground, we have the potential to grow more fruit, or to give each vine fewer bunches to ripen, so we can make even better wine. It’s a win-win!

Even the vines that were pulled out will help us in future, as most of it is being turned into fire wood we will use in our burners to ward off frosts in winter.

We normally do dry farming on these deep river soils, deposited by the nearby Ngaruroro River. However, for now we will put in some temporary irrigation to help the new vines through their first summer. In their second summer, they should be well established and able to look after themselves – ready to start producing some outstanding Chardonnay.

Each wine captures something of the time of its making – the summer heat, the breeze in the vines, the sun-baked soil. That’s why the same vine produces slightly different grapes every year.

As wine lovers, we get to revisit seasons past every time we sip a vintage wine.

Our winemakers at Babich spend their lives time-travelling, working with earlier harvests. While there are still wines from the 2019 harvest that demand a bit of fine-tuning, these days, most of our winemakers’ time is dedicated to the 2020 vintage, guiding this year’s wines to their eventual glory.

The classic Babich Sauvignon Blanc is nearing the end of its journey. The 2020 Babich Rosé is almost ready as well. Others require more loving care.

While this year’s great weather (coupled with hard work, of course!) means that all the wines are of great quality, our chief winemaker, Adam Hazeldine, does feel that the Irongate Chardonnay out of Hawke’s Bay could be the pick of the bunch from 2020.

Red wines march to a different drum, and for them it’s still early days, with many more months in barrel.

Our winemakers do not only get to relive the past when they taste wine, they also have to anticipate the future – how wines will develop over time, and what qualities they can acquire with careful attention.

It takes a lot of water to make a glass of wine. But that amount is already reducing in our Marlborough winery, and will diminish even more as we get the measure of water usage.

Our commitment to sustainability is all-encompassing, and the use of water in our winery has become one of the target areas for improvement. We have installed a number of water meters on site to get a better view of exactly where the water goes, so that we can identify the best ways to save.

Two activities account for the lion’s share of water use in the winery:

• Cleaning and hygiene. This includes flushing out tanks and pipes, cleaning equipment as well as the outside of wine tanks and the floor.
• The refrigeration plant that controls the temperature of our wine tanks use water evaporators.

Through more detailed measurement, we discovered that a surprisingly large portion of our total water use was to clean the crossflow filter used to get wine ready for bottling. We put our heads together and devised a way to reduce that amount by 20% without compromising the effectiveness of the filter in any way.

Our winery staff are continuing to analyse areas where we can make further savings. Our aim is to reduce our already relatively efficient total water usage by at least another 17% within the next three years.

The first wine produced from our 2020 vintage will be our Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc.

The time it takes from grape to wine depends on the variety, the sugar content, the ferment temperature, the type of yeast and the style of wine you want. Red wines that require longer skin contact and wooded wines that have to mature in oak obviously take longer.

“We are lucky with Sauvignon Blanc that we can bottle it so quickly,” says winemaker Adam Hazeldine. “You get that fresh and vibrant pungency.”

While New Zealand’s most famous variety can ferment fully in just over two weeks, it takes more work and skill before it can be bottled. Every ferment is tasted, graded for quality and its characteristics noted. Then comes the difficult decisions about assigning batches to different wines in our portfolio, and blending them to achieve the desired styles of wine.

At Babich, we celebrate the fact that each vintage is different and its wines will be different from the year before. However, we do have clear ideas on the style of each wine we make.

“We never aim to repeat the flavours of our last vintage, but we do keep the style consistent year on year,” says Adam.

When it comes to plants, we’re rather partial to Vitis vinifera. After all, these vines produce the grapes we use for our wines. But, actually, we plant a great many other species as well.

At our Penarth vineyard in Marlborough, we’ve just started planting 2,000 native trees and shrubs along the edge of a stream that ultimately feeds into the Wairau River. These include tussocks, flaxes, Hebe’s and Coprosma, as well as Kowhai and Cabbage  trees. They will not only beautify the vineyard, but will provide a habitat for native birds in particular.

(While we do go to lots of trouble to protect our grapes from birds leading up to harvest, it’s mainly starlings that are the problem, not native birds. We’re quite happy to feed Tuis!)

Even among our vines, we like having other plant species, especially buckwheat and phacelia. With their white and purple flowers respectively, these species are great at attracting beneficial insects to our vineyard. We like having wasps around, as they keep leafroller caterpillars in check, while ladybirds and lacewings keep tabs on aphids and mealybugs. That way, we don’t need to resort to chemicals to protect our vines from these destructive pests.

Beneficial interrow plants are vital for our organic vineyards in particular. We are currently expanding our organic vineyard operations by 80% – replanting one old vineyard block and converting another to fully organic. On these vineyards, we are now one year into the three-year programme before the vineyard is officially deemed organic.

The Kiwi spirit of number 8 wire is alive and well on our Marlborough vineyards. When we couldn’t get our normal pruning team of overseas seasonal workers due to Covid-19 border control, we made a plan to ensure that our vines will be pruned properly. This way, they can deliver yet another great harvest next year.

Step one was to start earlier – we started pruning some vines while others still had grapes on them.

Step two was to find other people to do the work. We simply gave our winery interns the option to stay on and move to vineyard work. Most opted to do so. We gave them training for a week, then a week working under close supervision until they got up to speed with how our vines need to be set up for the best results next harvest. After all, the pruning we do now is the first step of vintage 2021.

A third way to address the issue is to use mechanical equipment to remove the old canes cut off by the pruners, rather than having people do the heavy work of pulling these canes off the wires. Two of the machines that do this, the Klima pruning machine and Langlois vine stripper, were actually designed in Marlborough!

All of this means that, despite the unusual circumstances this year, our vines should be ready and in good shape to deliver great grapes again next year.

“The silver lining is that we may just learn something that we might not have otherwise,” says Marlborough viticulture manager, David Bullivant. “The challenges we’re facing could yet turn out to be a blessing, improving the way we prune for years to come.”

Simply the best. The Tina Turner song that has become the staple of weddings and team building days aptly describes the 2020 New Zealand grape harvest too.

In Hawke’s Bay, viticulturist Tony Smith reckons it’s the best vintage he’s seen in his 18-year career. In Marlborough, his colleague David Bullivant says it surpassed even the excellent 2012, 2015 and 2019 vintages – the best in at least a decade.

Dry, hot weather in the early months of the year let the grapes grow and ripen unhindered by damp and disease. The result was a harvest that met volume expectations, with the grapes in the Goldilocks Zone of sugar ripeness and intense flavour.

Having great vintages back to back like this is a rarity, says David. Every single variety yielded beautiful, flavourful fruit. And with new vineyards coming on stream, Babich had our largest ever harvest in Marlborough.

In Hawke’s Bay, the volume was as expected and the quality everything one could hope for. Especially pleasing there was the quality of first-crop Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot from our Highway 50 vineyard.

What this wondrous harvest means for wine lovers, is that you can expect stunning wine from both the 2019 and 2020 harvests – and good value for money too!

To preserve the distinct qualities of different wines, we keep them separate. That gives our winemakers more options to make blends that maximise the best qualities of each batch. We prefer to do this as late as possible in the process, for an obvious reason: You can always add separate wines together, but once blended, you cannot separate them again.

This basic winemaking principle of ours means that when organically grown grapes arrive in our winery, we can retain their integrity as organic wines without fundamentally changing our winemaking process.

We have to keep the organic stream separate from non-organic wines, but that happens as a matter of course. All grape, juice and wine vessels get thoroughly cleaned every time before we use it for a new batch. (How you do that is pretty simple, actually: you wash it until tests show that the wash water is pure. That shows that all traces of the previous content have been removed.)

So, in practice, most of what we have to do with organic wine is to make sure we keep it from getting mixed up with anything that was not organically grown.

Going organic does limit the tools at the winemaker’s disposal – reducing them by about three quarters. However, since we know this upfront, we adapt the decisions we make in the winery. For instance, we know we cannot use certain yeasts that contain a disallowed emulsifier, so we use others, often wild yeasts.

Because our range of potential fining agents is smaller, we can avoid wines becoming too tannic by limiting skin contact, for instance, rather than adjust tannin levels by fining. By choice, the fining agents we do use are not only organic, but also vegan, based on plant proteins rather than milk, eggs or isinglass.

When it comes to preservatives, we need to keep sulphur dioxide levels to below 100 parts per million for organic wines. Most of our red wines are below that level anyway, and our whites seldom exceed 120 parts per million. We simply make sure that we never exceed that threshold with organic wines.

Though it does require adjustments when we make organic wine, it is not substantially different from the way we usually work at Babich. Our winemakers prefer to use a light touch anyway, to let the natural qualities of our vineyards and grapes express themselves.

If grapes enter the winery as organic, it will remain organic all the way to your glass.

The best harvest in ten years under probably the strangest conditions. Our Marlborough vineyard and winemaking teams are absolutely delighted with the quality and quantity of the grapes they’re getting, but the smiles are mostly hidden behind face masks.

We are getting wonderfully flavourful, ripe and clean grapes coming into the winery. Even our newest vineyard, Pennarth, up in the Wairau Valley, yielded an amazing second crop of Sauvignon Blanc with sugar content at 22.5 degrees Brix and brilliant acid balance. Our winemaker Jens Merkle describes it as a dream result.

Instead of wet or cold weather, the challenge from nature this year is the blasted Covid-19 virus. Everyone still has to work, but has to wear face masks, wash their hands often and clean communal surfaces all the time, and keep their distance from each other. Instead of chatting to our people, truck drivers have to remain in their cabs. We even have to keep track of where everyone goes and who they see when they’re not at work.

Under these challenging conditions, we have people working round the clock to make sure we get this year’s excellent harvest into the winery.

Most every year, we start harvest with Irongate Chardonnay. Not a glass of it (though that would be fitting!) but by harvesting it.

The reasons for this are threefold: geography, variety and quality.

The geography part has to do with Hawke’s Bay. Being generally warmer than Marlborough, where we have our other vineyards, the grapes tend to ripen earlier. The variety has to do with it being Chardonnay, which ripens more readily than our other varieties. The quality has to do with the crop load, in other words how much work we expect the vine to do.

To make sure we get the quality we want for Irongate Chardonnay, we make it easy on the vines. We see to it that each vine only has to ripen about half as many bunches per season, compared to their peers elsewhere. The downside of this, of course, is that we get to make less wine. On the other hand: the wine we do make is so special! With fewer grapes to ripen, the vines can put more flavour into every bunch.

We pick these bunches by hand. They are taken to the winery in the same trays that they were put into in the vineyard, because we want the grapes to get to the winery as intact as possible, with all the juice locked into the berries.

That gives our winemakers more options – we can either crush the grapes and allow some skin contact before pressing, or we can put the whole bunches straight into the presses. Whole-bunch pressing lets us extract the juice cleanly, giving us wine with exceptional finesse and perfume.

We can then build palate weight and texture in the wine by blending it with juice that had some skin contact, and by giving it time to mature in the barrel.

The result of all this – after about a year – is our renowned Babich Irongate Chardonnay. Always worth the wait.