Massey Magazine November 2001 | winemaker Name: Michelle Richardson

winemaker
Name: Michelle Richardson
Qualification: BSc (Microbiology)

Michelle Richardson, senior winemaker at New Zealand’s second-largest winery, Villa Maria, predicts interesting times ahead for the country’s burgeoning wine industry.

If you visit Villa Maria headquarters in Mangere don’t expect shades of Provence or Italy or peasant chic. Villa Maria’s longtime home (until it shifts to new premises later next year) is a highly-authentic piece of industrial plant: a clutch of stainless steel fermenting tanks in and around a glorified shed, not so far from Auckland airport. This is a landscape of warehouses and parking lots, of multi-lane highways, of paddocks rank with grass, and clumps of state houses, yards cluttered with old cars.

The sun-steeped, insert-adjective-here shingles and clays of wine label puffery lie elsewhere; in Hawke’s Bay, Gisborne and Marlborough, where Villa Maria, New Zealand’s second largest winemaker, sources its fruit.

And it’s out there among the vines that one should really encounter Michelle Richardson, not here in this fluorescently lit attic, reached by a steel catwalk above the tanks.

As Villa Maria’s winemaker, Richardson is on a determined quest to tread every vineyard, sample every grape variety, and commit to memory every wine associated with the Villa Maria name. “Every plot has its own personality,” says Richardson, sounding more like a foster parent than a scientist. In fact, Richardson works according to her feel for how things should be; the science, she says, is something she has internalised.

“At the beginning I probably used intuition about 40 percent of the time because I didn’t have the confidence and now I use it about 60 percent. I weigh up the analysis of the wine with my gut feeling, what it tastes like, where I think it is going to go.

“You just let it go until you think you need to steer it somewhere. Different fruit needs different pathways. Some of it is experimentation. Not all of it works, but there has never been a disaster.”

Far from it. Villa Maria has garnered a slew of awards, and Richardson has been named New Zealand winemaker of year in the Australian Winestate awards for three years running: in 1998, 1999 and 2000.

Richardson, who was raised in the mid-North Island dairying town of Putaruru, came to Massey in the early 1980s to study first zoology – an absolute disaster, she terms it – and then, following her inclinations, microbiology. “I found the whole lifestyle of the yeasts and viruses and bacteria quite fascinating.”

And still does. “I find simple things quite pleasurable, like watching juice ferment, bubble, and just knowing that the yeasts are there, bubbling away. I find it very therapeutic…

“They are quite suicidal really; they create an environment in which they will eventually die…” she muses. Wine? “I didn’t get introduced to wine until I was well into my twenties,” says Richardson.

“When you think of the climate back then, there weren’t that many wineries, a lot of the wine was not to the standard it is today – and you were on a university student budget. There certainly wasn’t sophisticated drinking with your roast and three veg.”

Then, as she neared graduation in 1985, sage advice: “When I was thinking ‘what the heck am I going to do?’ Roy Thorndon, the micro lecturer back then said ‘Well you can do beer brewing or winemaking’.”

Not yet though. First there was the adventure of OE, working in London. “Dressing up in relatively nice clothes and going to an office doing temp work – it was so easy to impress the English with a work ethic,” remembers Richardson. “You didn’t have to do much and yet you achieved great things. It was a fantastic stage of life, because you had a job, you had no responsibility, you got paid a lot, and you had job satisfaction because they thought you were marvellous, and that gave you money to travel.” As Richardson did, visiting variously France, Italy, Asia, Nepal and Africa.

“It would be a shame if New Zealanders lost that OE rite of passage, the chance to see the world. You need to be based in Britain. You couldn’t do it with New Zealand dollars.”

They were three good years, then reality bit. “I thought ‘well, shivers, I’d better do something with my life’. I didn’t want to go into a laboratory with my degree — I knew I didn’t have the right personality for that.”

Richardson signed up for a postgraduate diploma in wine science at Adelaide’s Roseworthy College. “I found it interesting, but I didn’t know if I had what it would take,” she says. “I remember thinking I just could not see what others could see in the wines, but thankfully palates can be trained, and with more practice I began to understand the nature of tasting.

“You aren’t told that you can learn these things. Once I had really got into it I realised that I enjoyed it – and not only did I enjoy it, I was good at it.

“I think it is necessary, though, to really appreciate smell and taste. I get equally excited about a decent coffee or a good meal – and that ability to get excited about smell and taste makes winemaking and tasting a real pleasure.”

So could she now hold her own with wine cognoscenti if asked to taste? “I’d certainly have an opinion.” She pauses. “Yeah, I could do the whole bit.”

On graduating she knew what she wanted: an idyll by the sea. Her classmates were choosing potential employers that would sit well on the CV. The Richardson method: “I looked at the map and chose one [Cassegrain] by the sea. Right on the sea. I badgered them and they said yes. And so I drove for two days and stayed in a youth hostel until I found a flat. It’s half-way between Brisbane and Sydney. It’s beautiful...” her voice is touched with nostalgia. “A stunning piece of coastline.”

Three years later, and she was off again, this time as Hugh Ryman’s flying winemaker in France. “All it means is that they fly Australasian winemakers to European wineries and get them to make Australasian wine – very clean, very fruity – for the British supermarkets. And you make it very cheaply. The British market is very price-point driven,” explains Richardson.

In 1992 Richardson worked as a cellarhand at Villa Maria. Next was to be a stint in the vineyards of the US. It didn’t happen. Villa Maria founder George Fistonich phoned Richardson offering her the job of assistant winemaker, and a year later, in 1994, she was appointed winemaker. Fortune had smiled. “I had a very good teacher and supporter in the winemaker, Grant Edmonds, and he was always going to leave to do his own thing, which paved the way for my present position.”

In Villa Maria Richardson had joined one of New Zealand’s oldest wineries, dating all the way back to 1962 (ours is a young industry), when it was founded by George Fistonich, who was born in a homestead close by the Mangere winery. Fistonich’s parents, Croatian immigrants – many of New Zealand’s early winemakers were from the Balkans – made wine for a hobby and they worried about his future when he abandoned carpentry to start up Villa Maria in 1962. But Fistonich was canny. Villa Maria bought out Vidal in 1976 and by 1987 had acquired the Esk Valley winery, which had gone into receivership. It pioneered the winery restaurant business. (Jim McClay and then Prime Minister Rob Muldoon were plied with wine and argument at a Fistonich-hosted barbecue.) It started two unlisted publicly owned companies, Terra Vitae and Seddon vineyards, to supply Villa Maria with grapes, and in 2000 opened a $7.5 million state-of-the-art winery in Marlborough.

Being 40 years old hardly counts when set against the age of the French aristocracy of Bordeaux, who pioneered the production of modern red wine 300 years ago. And French wine is unassailably better, or so the French have insisted on the basis of lineage, of complexity, of terroir – that unique essence of place. But that hasn’t stopped the British market, in particular, from turning to Australasian wine. Australian wine sales in Britain are expected to overtake French wine sales by Christmas, and that despite a price premium of $NZ3.56 a bottle.

The truth is that once stripped of their cultural trappings, French wine is not always that good, says Richardson. “This whole thing about French wine being complex and what-have-you. Yes, there are some beautifully complex wines, and I don’t think we will ever attain that, but that’s perhaps about less than 5 percent of the wine. There is a lot of very grubby and badly made wine sold under the guise of ‘it’s complex’.”

The French system, she says, is mired in unthinking tradition. “The village has to grow chardonnay, there’s no two ways about it. If there’s a problem with their chardonnay, well tough. And their trellising system – everything they do has some sort of law attached to it.”

T he qualities that are making New Zealand’s winemakers a force to bereckoned with have to do with a willingness to change and experiment.

“If you’ve got people saying, ‘Well I don’t know about those clones or that rootstock’, we’ll go ‘Right, whip that out’,” says Richardson. “The whole time we are experimenting.”

Then, too, Richardson’s lifestyle of the footloose winemaker switching between hemispheres with the harvests is not atypical. “We watch the world and we cherry pick and put things into place very quickly.

“I mean look at coffee,” she says, switching tack. “Five years ago you couldn’t have found decent flat white if you sold your soul for it, whereas now you can go to a basic cafe in the middle of nowhere and be able to get one. You go to America and you are really pushing to find a decent coffee there.”

T he world likes our wines. Our clean, fruit-driven style is favoured by themarket, and in one category – sauvignon blanc – ours is the wine against which others are judged. New Zealand has 1.6 percent of the British wine market, but 10 percent in the above $NZ18 category.

You might think it time to dust off some hoarded vintage and relax beneath the trellises. We seem to be sitting pretty, until you do the maths. In 2001 the vintage was around six million cases. In 2002 the vintage is forecast to be 10 million cases. New Zealanders consume about 4.5 million cases – a figure that has plateaued. Somehow we have to find markets for an additional four million cases.

“Very scary,” Richardson terms the scenario. “All the growth is going to have to be export. We are really going to have make very good wine and get together as an industry to promote ourselves.”

One consequence, she predicts, will be an industry amalgamation. “There is definitely going to be a shake-up in two years’ time.”

“We know that the growth is going to be in export, and we know that the global market doesn’t like one case of this and five cases of that. You can get your little boutique wines into quaint little restaurants where you know the proprietor, but the reality is the majority want to deal in volumes, so they find boutique wineries and their small volumes difficult to include in their portfolios.

“One buyer from a supermarket chain in Britain said to me, ‘Look, Marlborough is a disaster’, and I said, ‘How can you say that? There are such fantastic wines there… yadda yadda’, “And the buyer said ‘Because I could buy the sauvignon blanc from ten wineries there, but I don’t want 10 labels, I want one label at volume. I don’t have the shelf space to put 10 labels on – I can sell the volume of those wineries, but not ten labels. I almost want to ignore everyone from Marlborough except Montana and Selaks and Villa Maria.’

“That’s a real shame, because there are some wonderful wines being made there, but they just don’t have the volumes.

“However, that is just one avenue to sell wine. We will have to make sure that we use a lot of others too.”

Just more disillusionment for the starry-eyed new entrants into the wine industry?

“It’s funny really. You get people who have made money being really astute business people, who get to 55 and say, ‘Well I really quite fancy running a winery’, and they really don’t realise the amount of time, effort and money that you need, and then they are a slave to their dreams.

“Then you get some years when nature says ‘Nup, sorry, you aren’t going to get a great vintage’. For people who come from a background of putting in effort, getting a reward, all of a sudden they are putting in all this effort and there is no reward.”

Which wines are the future of the New Zealand wine industry?

“I think that pinot noir is the variety that everyone is going to try to make and make well, and we’ll keep with sauvignon blanc, and Hawke’s Bay will produce Bordeaux-style reds,” predicts Richardson.

Whether we will continue to see plantings of chardonnay, a variety at which other countries also excel, is something else. Back in the 1980s a vine pull was instituted. Out came the plantings of muller thurgeau, riesling sylvaner and other “really bland, neutral dry white wines”, as Richardson puts it.

New Zealand, she says, has yet to give serious thought to its current plantings.

Will the domestic market then be awash in affordable pinot noir? Alas, probably not. “Pinot needs a lot of work and you can’t crop it that heavily, you have to crop it a lot less than sauvigon blanc,” says Richardson. “The volume will be less, so the only way you can make it viable is to sell it for more. That is the problem: we are going to have this very expensive pinot noir, so for it to sell it is going to have to be very, very good. The competition will be the French burgundies and the American pinot noirs.”

Increasingly the wine we buy will come with screw-top Stelvin closures rather than corks. “Everyone has just had enough of corked wines,” says Richardson. The word is that perhaps 5 percent of the wine we drink is corked. “If not more,” says Richardson.

“It’s like painting a beautiful painting and then asking people to view it through a plastic sheet. As a winemaker I have to question why I am bothering to create something that can be ruined by a cork, although I do think Stelvin closures need to become more attractive.”

Richardson sees the wine industry as part of a welcome trend for New Zealanders to adopt a more cosmopolitan lifestyle and to find delight in life’s sensory pleasures.

“When I think about what I grew up with and the food that we were given,” she says aghast. “Now we might have five-year-olds eating olives and feta cheese,” she says with evident approval. “And we’ve got such great produce.”

Villa Maria may be part of the transformation of Mangere. Villa Maria’s new home, a 27-hectare site a kilometre or so distant, will have room for plantings of gurwurztraminer, a grape variety that will accept Auckland’s climate.

“Apparently a golf course is going in,” says Richardson. There are plans for a restaurant, a lagoon and perhaps accommodation. Mangere City Council is to fill in the sewerage ponds.

“Mangere needs it. It is a really nice place, but it’s been a little neglected over the last 20 years.”