Winemaker set for hands-on vintage

                      OTT HAMMOND/Marlborough Express

WINEGROWING: Ara Wines chief winemaker Jeff Clarke checks some pinot noir grapes, the first fruit of Ara's harvest, which has been hand picked by Berry Ramel of Ambrym, Vanuatu.

Ara Wines' new chief winemaker is used to spending vintages on the move, but this time it will be on the road rather than in the air.

Jeff Clarke joined the Todd Corporation-owned wine company two weeks before vintage, with just enough time to get his bearings and prepare to jump into this year's crush.

Mr Clarke left Brancott, formerly known as Montana, where he had been for 17 years. As national chief winemaker he spent a bit of time jetting around the country to Montana wineries during vintages.

He was looking forward to getting more juice on his hands, rather than having to deal with the strategic, managerial decisions of a nationwide brand.

He will be splitting his time between overseeing the crush at Riverlands contract winery Indevin and sampling and planning at the State Highway 63 vineyard near the Waihopai River.

You would struggle to find a Marlborough-based vineyard and contract winery further away from each other, and Mr Clarke will be doing a few of the one-hour round trips before harvest wraps up. The vineyard is situated at what was Bankhouse Station in the Wairau Valley.

He followed the first Ara grapes of the season into the winery on Tuesday afternoon and was back for planning and sampling at the vineyard afterward.

The Australian-born winemaker has more than 30 years of experience in wine. However, he has a new challenge in making wine at a contract winery. "Every other place that I've worked in had a central winery, so that's certainly a new experience for me. It's a case of needing to be mindful of what our booking slot is rather than having the freedom of just being able to change the plan at any point subject to grapes and weather."

However, he was pretty relaxed about his first vintage in charge of Ara's wine.

"Here in Marlborough we do have quite stable weather through harvest year in, year out, and don't have situations where you have continuous poor weather."

He was excited about working with Ara fruit, which came from vines established in an odd way for Marlborough, but an old European way which accentuates the terroir.

Planted in narrow rows, the vines are not given an easy ride with drip-fed water, and instead are given limited water from an overhead system which encourages the roots to dig as deep as they can to get more nutrients from the soil, he said.

This gives the fruit a flavour infused with where it was grown, he said. "It's very exciting and certainly the fruit is looking really intense this year. So if the weather doesn't come along to spoil it and I – and the rest of my team – don't spoil it, we should have a great vintage," he said. "The winemaker is only the custodian of the grapes – and that's particularly the case with sauvignon blanc."