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.

As we approach harvest and the grapes go through veraison, they don’t only get attractive to us humans. In the last weeks before harvest, the hard, green grape berries become juicy and tasty. The red grape varieties gain colour and the white varieties soften. The sugar content goes up, and the berries double in weight. And everybody wants a taste.

Even our vineyard dog, Rosie, has a pretty good palate and would start eating low-hanging fruit once they’re ripe enough, acting like she’s the Chief Maturity Sampling Technician or something. But we’re not worried about Rosie and the bunches she munches.

It’s the birds. Unless they are stopped, birds would destroy the harvest.

The larger birds such as blackbirds and thrushes that steal a berry and fly off with it don’t really bother us too much. It’s the tiny ones, the sparrows and wax-eyes, that cause the trouble. They peck a hole in one berry and then flit off to another bunch to do the same, and then another… And in each of these places, rot sets in, mostly sour rot, that would essentially turn the wine we make from such bunches into vinegar. And nobody wants to relax with a glass of vinegar.

We try to scare off the birds by making noise in the vineyard, but the most effective way to stop them is to put nets over the vine rows. They can find food somewhere else – the grapes are for us!

Working on the taste

In the weeks before the nets go up, we do a lot of work to make sure the grapes are as tasty as possible.

A big thing for us is to get the crop loads right, so that we get the quality wine we want.   Our vineyard team goes through the vine rows to get an accurate estimate of the crop they carry. There’s a lot of counting. We even have a smart little app that lets you take a photo of the bunch, and it counts the berries and grades them into large/medium/small berries. Using mathematical models, we get a sense of the eventual crop load and can then compare it to what we know gives us the wine quality we want.

This often means we have to remove some of the bunches – we’d rather have a smaller crop of better grapes that ensure you can enjoy tastier wine.

If only the birds would develop a taste for the unripe fruit that falls to the ground at this stage and leave the ripe grapes to us. But no, they love a sweet, juicy grape as much as we do.

The simple truth of it is that if it weren’t for the nets, we wouldn’t be able to make the wine you love.

If you’re feeling a bit parched on a hot summer’s day, just imagine how thirsty the vines can get when they stand out in the hot Marlborough sun day in and day out. On the face of it, the idea of withholding irrigation from them seems downright cruel.

But it’s exactly what our Marlborough viticulturists are doing. Not out of cruelty (they love their vines), but with the twin objectives of saving water and improving our wine.

“We believe people may have traditionally over-watered the vines,” says David Bullivant, Marlborough Area Viticultural Manager for Babich. That is why Babich volunteered our vineyards for a trial run by NZ Winegrowers. This placed Babich at the forefront of this research in New Zealand.

What happens in most of the New Zealand wine industry is that viticulturists measure the moisture in the soil, and then when the levels get too low, they irrigate – mostly by drip irrigation delivered near the foot of each vine.

“We’ve become much smarter with this over the years,” says David. “On most vineyards, they would irrigate long and deep if the soil has good water-holding capacity, for instance clay soils. Where the soils are more stoney and free draining, we need to water small amounts and often, otherwise the water simply drains right through the soil profile.”

However, he believes further improvements are possible.

One of the breakthroughs is not to measure the water in the soil, but in the vine itself. Using a device they call the “pressure bomb”, our viticulturists measure the pressure of water in the vine, a bit like measuring someone’s blood pressure. This gives a more accurate indication of the level of water stress the plant experiences.

During the ongoing irrigation trials, the trial area only received irrigation when the water pressure in the vine dropped below given thresholds. In the 2018/19 season, this meant that the vines in the trial received less than 50% as much water as their neighbours, who were watered using current industry standards.

“This had a number of impressive benefits,” says David. “For one thing, we saved a lot of water.”

This is great for someone like David who is passionate about our natural resources – water preservation in itself, but also benefiting aquatic life and giving Kiwis the opportunity to enjoy our waterways more.

“This is something of a crusade for me,” admits David.

“In terms of managing the vineyard, we also saved cost, as the drier parts of the vineyard had fewer weeds we had to control. As for the vines, we didn’t have to crop-thin or leaf pluck as much.”

The eventual crop load was higher than from neighbouring vine rows, the berries were smaller and sweeter.

“Our winemakers preferred the wines from the drier vine rows, especially the Pinot Noir. Our senior winemaker, Adam Hazeldine, said the wines from the drier rows showed more density, plushness and complexity.”

After two years, the trial results point at the possibility to do dry farming, i.e. not irrigate at all.

“We’re not there yet and it may not be suitable for all sites, but it is something we definitely want to try at some of our Babich vineyard blocks in future. With less irrigation, there is more incentive for root development. With better root systems, the vine is able to find water further afield. It makes them more robust, able to better withstand the droughts we experience in Marlborough. At the same time, it creates opportunities for the vines to pick up minerals that can be reflected as extra complexity in the eventual wines.”

So, when you feel like a drop in a year or so, the Babich wine you choose may be even more flavourful than what we have now!

After making wine for more than 100 years, like we have at Babich, you get a different perspective. You take a longer view. Of course, we think about the wine we’ll make from the coming 2020 harvest, but we also think beyond that, to the wine we’ll be making in 10, 50, or 100 years. We want to make sure that the sixth generation of the Babich family will inherit healthy vineyards capable of growing grapes for their wines.

As chief winemaker Adam Hazeldine puts it, “You can’t keep pushing the land year after year and expect to keep getting the same quality from it.”

For our future wines to be as good as they can be, we need to make sure that our vineyards are fully sustainable, and the world we live in as sustainable as we can make it.

Simply put, you have to give back. Pay it forward, as we like to say. Invest now in our future… and the future pleasure of all those who enjoy Babich wines.

We’ve achieved part of our goal already – all our vineyards are certified sustainable by Sustainable Winegrowing New Zealand. In fact, our Fernhill vineyard was one of the first in the country to achieve this status, back in the 1980s. Ten years ago, we became an accredited member of Sustainable Winegrowing New Zealand. This means that 100% of our grapes and all of our winemaking facilities are sustainably accredited.

But sustainability is not a goal you reach or a box you tick, it’s a journey. We raise the bar year after year, always looking for ways to be more sustainable. By adding more gear to our tractors, we can perform more actions on a single pass past the vineyard rows – saving fuel and minimising soil compaction.

In our Hawke’s Bay vineyards, we haven’t used any glyphosate weed killer since early 2017 – something that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Some of our Marlborough vineyards have also achieved this milestone, while others are nearly there.

Our Headwaters vineyard in Marlborough is fully organic. This is a direction we’ll keep exploring.

“You can always do more and better,” says Adam. “It’s about us being kaitiaki, guardians of the land, and also about maintaining our ability to make great wines. Ultimately, sustainable winemaking delivers results you can see in the vineyard and taste in the glass.”

So, next time you enjoy some Babich wine, remember to raise a glass to the land!