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Every so often someone comes along and shifts the course of history. According to many, the recent trajectory of Marlborough - in which a pastoral farming area was transformed into the largest grape-growing region in the country, mostly producing sauvignon blanc - was partly directed by an Irish salesman with a gift for blarney.
Ernie Hunter had been, among other things, a publican, tour operator and stage show manager before he bought 26ha of land in Marlborough and started growing grapes. That was 1979; there were only half a dozen wineries in the region, most notably Montana, which had moved into the region only six years earlier.
But the 80s wasn't an easy time to be a winemaker. The rest of the world didn't take New Zealand seriously as a wine-making country. New Zealanders didn't even take themselves seriously as a wine-making country. Actually, we weren't taking wine very seriously at all, unless it was fortified or came in a two-litre box with added sugar.
By the mid 80s, Ernie Hunter decided he needed to sell overseas, and was convinced the English palate would be up for something different. And so, in 1986, he took a chardonnay and a fume blanc (oak-aged sauvignon blanc) to the London Sunday Times Vintage Festival Club. This took gall.
In those days, wine festivals were rarer than they are today, harder to get into and crucial to emerging wineries. This particular one offered the 6000 members of the Sunday Wine Club a chance to taste 350 pre-selected wines from 13 countries, and included some of the top wine producers in the world.
But Ernie reputedly had charm and the gift of the gab, often being described as one of those "once met, never forgotten" kind of guys. He worked the room hard, luring people in with his chatter and trays of fresh oysters, telling them he'd flown them in from Bluff when he'd actually bought them from downtown London. He must have been persuasive - and presumably the wine was good - because his fume blanc won three of the top awards. It was an unheard of hat-trick which infuriated the French and alerted the British wine press to the distinctive taste of the Marlborough sauvignon blanc.
As anyone who has tried the 2008 vintage will know, the typical Marlborough sauvignon blanc now smells of passionfruit, melon, peaches and so forth, but those early versions punched you in the face with the potent whiff of freshly cut grass, asparagus or, most famously, cat's pee on a gooseberry bush. If Ernie knew what sauvignon blanc was supposed to taste like - which until then tended to have the mineral, flinty characteristics of French sancerre - he mightn't have been so eager to show his off. "I don't think Ernie had any in-depth knowledge of wine," agrees Jane Hunter, who had married him two years earlier.
"But he was a fantastic marketer." Some in the industry now say the Marlborough sauvignon blanc was the first new wine taste the world had been offered in a century. And many in the industry credit Ernie (along with wine giants Montana and Cloudy Bay) as drawing attention to it and, in the process, kick-starting New Zealand's wine export industry.
Two decades on, the industry is still largely dominated by Marlborough sauvignon blanc. The following year, just as exports were escalating and Hunter's Wines' accounts were beginning to look a lot rosier, Ernie was killed in a head-on collision on the way home from Christchurch. His wife wrote the eulogy but, too shocked to speak about her husband, asked Terry Dunleavy, head of the New Zealand Wine Institute, to deliver it. She stood beside him, staring at her hands. Jane was a viticulturalist - her first job in Marlborough was chief viticulturalist for Montana - and a reluctant business manager. She was grieving but someone had to take over. She owed it to her husband.
Numerous publishers have approached Jane Hunter about a biography, but she dithered for ages before finally agreeing to one. The caveat was that she'd have some control over it, and that it would be a story about Marlborough with a little bit of her story woven through it, rather than a book all about her. She clearly got her way. Given the title is Jane Hunter: Growing a Legacy, Jane keeps a notably low profile. Those looking for revelations of the personal kind won't learn much more than she's shy, gets migraines, hates flying and adores dogs.
It's better described as a business story, one of a pioneering boutique winery launched by a charismatic salesman and which was built into one of the country's most highly regarded wineries by his determined wife. But given that Jane was never going to give much away, you can't help wondering why she even took the risk of agreeing to a biography at all. "Well, it wasn't an easy decision," she says. "But I think that over the years, the story of Ernie and the importance of what he did has been lost, and that is our true legacy, New Zealand's and Marlborough's.
A lot of people have come into the industry in the last five years who didn't even know who he was. But here's someone who came into the industry for a very short time but did a lot for it. "We had a business that was going down the gurgler," she says. "We had no money. The wine wasn't selling, and people weren't interested in New Zealand wine. Ernie had sunk everything into the business but it was struggling. But in three years he turned that around. And it wasn't just his own business. It was a significant turnaround for the whole industry." Winemaking or, more specifically, selling wine, is largely about storytelling.
Most commonly the story is about a maverick winemaker, or the winemaking family that stretches back for generations, or the region in which the grapes are grown - the French call it terroir - all of which infuses a wine with a certain character, in terms of both taste and marketability. You might not sell a lousy wine with a good story, but it's just as hard to sell wonderful wine without one.
In the 21st century the spotlight has shifted away from the Hunters, but in the late 80s and 90s the story of the grieving widow building up her husband's company in an emerging industry captivated people and undoubtedly helped build the company's profile. Being female didn't hurt either - she was a woman in charge of a winery when there were few women in the industry at all. The attention was good for the business, but it also made her uneasy.
"Very uneasy. I did have to be careful. I didn't want to overplay that, but at the same time, we had the opportunity to get some extra attention because of it." But Jane was never a particularly social person, unlike her late husband. "Ernie was a people person and a very likeable character who could charm anyone. But I found it extremely difficult to go out there and meet people. I'm not a character like he was."
Nerves aside, and cutting a long story short, she got some excellent advice, hired the right people, produced some fine wines, collected dozens of national and international awards, was named one of the top five winemakers in the world and awarded an OBE. The company currently produces around 60,000 cases of wine a year, more than half of which is exported to Britain, Australia, Canada, Brazil, Dubai, Malta, Denmark, Sweden, Holland, Ireland and, more recently, Slovakia.
Around 70 per cent of the company's exports are still sauvignon blanc. And around 70-75 per cent of Marlborough is still planted out with sauvignon blanc. Commentators have been predicting the bursting of the sauvignon blanc bubble for years but demand, says Jane, keeps growing.
The next couple of years will be hard - it was a "stunning" vintage across all the varieties but they had a greater than expected crop (which reduces margins) and these are unusual economic times. "But there are still places around the world who haven't had sauvignon blanc before."
Many winemakers and viticulturalists confess, usually off the record, that they've had enough of sauvignon blanc and would love it if the world started demanding something else, like riesling or chardonnay. But nowhere, so far, seems to be able to produce sauvignon blanc like they do in Marlborough. And if Jane is bored by the variety, she isn't saying. She will say that increasing competition and ever decreasing margins is making it more difficult for the variety to deliver a profit and she, like many, is certain pinot noir will be the region's Next Big Thing. "It's where our sauvignon blanc was 10 or 15 years ago. We can't keep up with the demand."
So Jane, having devoted two decades to growing her husband's legacy, has in doing so created one of her own. The life wasn't entirely of her choosing, was often exhausting and she's had periods when she seriously contemplated getting out of the business. "It took a lot of my life before I thought I could get a personal life back. In all honesty, if someone came along 10 years ago and offered me the CEO of Hunter's. I would have said, 'no thanks'.
But you just step into things and things evolve and for me things have evolved in a way that I've had to take responsibility." But mostly, she has enjoyed it. "Yes, I don't look back with any true regrets. Obviously I would have loved to go through life with Ernie.
I'm very happy with my partner now [Graeme Coates, biologist, businessman and executive officer of the New Zealand Marine Farming Association], but when you marry someone you expect to live out your life with them. But who knows where that would've gone anyway. Or how Hunter's would've gone. So you never know. You just have to accept things and keep moving."
* Jane Hunter: Growing a Legacy by Tessa Anderson (HarperCollins $49.99)
