Joe Babich, a rare vintage

Joe Babich loves the process of growing grapes and producing wine, and says he learned the skill by trial and error. Picture / Glenn Jeffrey

Joe Babich stands in the barrel room with a glass of red wine which he sniffs and swirls. He holds it up to the light. He is very interested in it. Then he says "I'm not drinking this," and throws the liquid out the door with a much-practised flick of his wrist.

There's nothing wrong with the wine. He just doesn't drink much red wine these days. He has high levels of uric acid, which means gout - although he hastens to add he's only ever had one attack of that hazard of the winemaker's trade.

Still, I'm sure his marketing manager will tick him off. He could have waxed lyrical about what wonderful stuff it is. He could have gone on about ripe sweet blackberries and plums or about how it broods or seduces or intoxicates. Which is how some wine people talk about wine.

Babich doesn't. He doesn't gush about freshly mown hay or elves dancing in the mouth or anything, well, ridiculous. "No, no. Look, I go over to our tasting room where we do all the serious tasting and it always surprises me when the younger people, who have been through the colleges ... the descriptions they come up with! It tastes like mushrooms. It tastes like honey, all these flavours. I'm very orthodox. It's just 'strong cabernet sauvignon character'." In other words, it tastes like wine.

Although he could have got in a plug. Perhaps: "This red wine is not too bad. People might like to buy it." Well, I gave him every opportunity to talk his wine up, but it's not in his nature. I don't think he does effusive, or broods, either. He doesn't feel the need to make his wine sound seductive or intoxicating (that it might well be, of course, is up to you). He is the most contented fellow I've ever met.

His winery - the family business - is 90 this year. Babich is the managing director. He used to be the winemaker and still sticks his well-honed nose in at blending time. He has, according to the NBR Rich List, got pots of money. According to that list, the family is worth about $37 million.

His father Josip came out from what was then Dalmatia at the age of 14. He went gum-digging and hated it because it was horrible and hard: "up to your waist in cold water in a swamp". He planted some grapes in Henderson and got a little business going selling mostly fortified wine.

That Josip Babich came to New Zealand at all - and that Joe Babich and his brother Peter and Peter's son, David, are still here, running this multimillion-dollar business, is one of those accidents of birth and hereditary rights. It was as simple as this: in a place called Imotski in what is now Croatia, Josip was born into a family with too many sons and too little land. So four of the five boys came here and one stayed behind. Joe Babich has a first cousin still on that land in Imotski. The cousin still grows grapes and tobacco. Babich went on a visit in 1967. He drank the wine. How lucky, it was, I say, that he had the right father. Otherwise he'd be in the place of his cousin, making dreadful plonk. "Ha, ha," he says, "Oh, I'd drink it. Some of it can actually be quite nice. But I was looking at it as a professional winemaker and I was probably the only one thinking that way."

It is somehow heartening to think that the Babich family have been making wine not just for 90 years but possibly for centuries. "There's no way I can answer that, but where my father comes from, there's a lot of land, there's tobacco on the hills and grapes on the flats. So I would say generations have been doing it. But make no mistake, it's still cottage industry stuff."

His father's proudest moment came, says Babich, in the early 80s when the winery sold its first wine for export. A chap from Germany came to the winery and knocked on the door of the old family home "and he ordered a container of wine off us and we'd never exported before and we thought, 'Oh, gee, this is great,' you know. And Dad was really tickled pink by that because the wine was going to go back to Europe and he'd come from Europe to find a new life. He said it was the absolute highlight of his career and he would have been 85 then." Babich now exports 90 per cent of the wine it produces and has vineyards in the Hawke's Bay and Marlborough. All of which, no doubt, Josip Babich would have been both tickled pink and flabbergasted by.

There were five Babich kids and Joe Babich says they didn't grow up rich. "Not at all. I think we had a pretty reasonable standard of living but I wouldn't consider that we were rich by any means."

He is now, which must be nice. "Oh, well, people have said that, but I'm not sure about that, really. No one takes the debts into account. They don't. And if you asked me here and now what the worth of our family or our company is, I really don't know."

He is 65 and "I don't feel like retiring at the moment." His greatest extravagances are vines. What he likes to do best is what he does for a living. "Funnily enough so much of our lifestyle is intermingled with the business that what I like doing is growing grapes and making wine, really. I just find it satisfying to be growing something, producing something." He doesn't have a computer and while the grape yields are entered on somebody else's computer, he still keeps a handwritten ledger.

He is obviously a very good businessman - he learned this and winemaking, on the job, "by trial and error". He says: "Well, I would hope I'm a good businessman. You have to be to compete in this business." This is the most business-y thing he says all afternoon. He never once used the word "motivation" or talked about "inspiration". He says, "We don't really aim at anything. We just run our business."

There is nothing very romantic about winemaking in the 21st century: "I suppose if you're going to classify it, it is probably a modern branch of food technology." But there is a sort of magic to what ends up in the bottle. That's art and experience, he says.

There is room, too, for sentiment. The vines outside produced 55 tonnes of grapes of last year's harvest of 2300 tonnes. "We keep it for two reasons. One is imagery. It's nice to have grapes around a winery.

"And there's lifestyle. We grew up here and we always had the land and the vines and we like it. I suppose if we spoke to the accountants they'd say we'd be better to flog it off and put [the money] into vineyards down in Marlborough."

Babich's house is just up the road - it was Babich Rd even when it was just a track. His brother's house, on the vineyard, is a modest brick and tile. "I don't mean to be rude," I say, "but that doesn't look like a millionaire's house." This makes him laugh quite a lot and he says "Oh, you should talk to him about that, then."

He has a sly sense of humour. He let me bang on about a process called micro-oxygenation, which uses very small bubbles to soften tannin and, as I put it, "fluff it up". "Does it?" he says. "Fluffs it up? What does that mean?" I have no idea because I know absolutely nothing about micro-oxygenation - which didn't stop me saying what a terrible thing it was. Much later he showed me vats with machinery for micro-oxygenation. He didn't even smirk.

I ask him whether the wine he makes reflects anything of his personality and he says it probably does. "We make fairly subtle styles, not in-your-face wine. We're pretty restrained. And, you know, I'm by nature a reasonably cautious kind of person."

That sounds about right. He is also a very nice chap, and not just because he gave me a very nice bottle of wine. Which I'm sure will be restrained but good company and - on the evidence of that micro-oxygenation business - just a bit cheeky.