Donated bottles of wine will generate as much as $40,000 for their cyclone-damaged peers
Small wineries across New Zealand are banding together to help their peers hit hard by Cyclone Gabrielle.
Hawkes Bay is a significant winemaking region, and many vineyards, big and small, were affected by the flooding, with vines washed away, inundated with silt or sitting with wet roots.
In the days following Gabrielle, Renée Dale, who operates niche wine subscription business Boutique Collection and is a winemaker herself, fielded calls and emails from customers and producers around the country wondering what they could do to help.
The result was a fundraiser, with her network of small producers around the country donating 600 bottles in a day or two from 22 brands, with offers to donate wine still coming in.
Boutique Collection is selling the wine in lucky dip three packs for $100 a pop, hoping to raise as much as $20,000 towards Hawkes Bay Winegrowers Charitable Trust and a Gisborne Winegrowers fund.
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The Hawkes Bay trust will match the donation amount up to $30,000.
Almost 100 of the 200-odd mystery boxes have already sold. “The crazy thing is that we're still getting wineries contacting me saying, 'hey, can we get involved?' I say 'yep, but we’re packing on Saturday,'” Dale said.
“If we get enough in the future to donate more, we probably will. But if we can get it all done in one day, that'd be wicked.
“I guess the real story here, in my view, is the unity and solidarity of these little producers across the country.
“Pretty much all of the brands who have donated will be bootstrapping it. A lot of them will be working for another company and then on the side, they've got their own little vineyard or little brand.”
Many of the winemakers would normally be going to Hawkes Bay to help with the current vintage, and Dale said donating was their only way of helping out.
She said some of the brands she stocks had been hit, including Petane in the Esk Valley.
Petane’s winery had silt three-quarters of the way up its walls and all of its seven hectares of vineyard were wiped out.
“He was able to get a lot of help from the small community of producers to kind of clean all his bottles of wine and whatnot.
She said the damage would be more widespread. “The main concern really is not necessarily the immediate visual loss of vineyard, because you might look at a vineyard and it's still standing, but if their roots are completely sodden in water it can really dilute the nutrients in the soil.
“There could be some massive long-term loss in Hawkes Bay for some of these growers. At the moment, I think they're just kind of trying to deal with immediate problems.”
