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With his long white hair, a beard he clips "every few months", paint-flecked trousers and work-roughened hands, Peter Yealands doesn't look like he has the $75 million this year's NBR Rich List estimated he's worth.
The Blenheim farmer says he's just an "average Kiwi man" who, after leaving school at 14, has worked for himself for all but 18 months of his life. He resents his Rich List presence, saying it's "an infringement" on privacy and that he doesn't put much value in monetary wealth anyway.
The figure itself is "wrong", but he won't say by how much. "The thing is, you never know how much you're worth anyway, [it] changes." He doesn't indulge in the trappings of your average Rich Lister either. He didn't own a suit until the August opening of his Yealands Estate winery, New Zealand's largest privately-owned vineyard which will produce up to one million cases of wine a year. He and wife Vai live in a "cheap" three-bedroom house in the centre of Seaview, their 1000ha vineyard property in Seddon, Marlborough, and he proudly recalls that for the first 20 years of their marriage they slept on a mattress he rescued from the local dump. No, Vai didn't mind, chuckles Yealands. "It was better than the one we had before."
However, under the earthy exterior is a hard-working, entrepreneurial risk-taker. The kind of bloke who, when he couldn't buy what he needed for his mussel farm, made it instead - and went on to make millions manufacturing it. As well as his four Marlborough vineyards, Yealands has a swag of investments in and around Blenheim: a car importing business, a deer farm, a coastal subdivision, a quarry, a heavy machinery hire business and shares in Flat Creek, a small West Coast coalmine. His latest project, the Yealands Estate winery in Seddon, is another in a long line of labour-based ventures to which 60-year old Yealands has dedicated his life. He doesn't have hobbies.
When pushed, Vai says he likes watching sport on television. Sometimes they go for a Sunday drive and they take the dog for a walk after dinner. "Overall, I live for what I'm doing, getting things up and running," Yealands says. "I don't see it as work. There are things I don't like doing ... but I'm happiest when I'm out working." It's always been so.
From the age of 8 or 9 he worked in his father's Blenheim grocery shop, bagging dates and sugar and cracking walnuts. At 17 he bought himself a hay-baler, welding extra bars above the cab so he could carry an extra 25 bales. He also rigged the baler to inject molasses into straw, turning what farmers would otherwise have burnt into good cattle feed. Unfortunately, while the local cockies were interested in the innovation, they didn't want to pay for it.
After a couple of seasons a drought folded the business anyway, so Yealands took up contracting, working with a team of labourers doing "anything, because you could in those days". Throughout Marlborough they dug drains, built bridges, laid footpaths and assembled school playgrounds. "We made a killing. That was my first real good money," he recalls.
However, as business increased, so did his tax rate. In 1968 the Government introduced 120 per cent tax breaks for marine farming. Yealands seized the chance and set up a Greenshell mussel farm in Queen Charlotte Sound, convincing his father, Keith, and his younger twin brothers, Stephen and Kevin, to join him.
Stories about the Yealands brothers, in particular Peter, are "legendary" among veteran marine farmers. The resource management laws were a little different back then, laughs Bruce Hearn, who, along with the Yealands gang, was one of the first in Marlborough to get a mussel farming licence. He recalls a story about Yealands, a stick of dynamite (used to scare away hungry snapper) and a boatload of mussel harvesters. Then there was the time Yealands' boat caught fire and sank at the Havelock wharf, taking its load of freshly harvested mussels with it.
It was the manufacturing side of the industry, though, where Yealands' innovative streak is heralded. He bought a sock-making machine from clothing manufacturer Lane Walker Rudkin and made a special stocking that helped spat attach to the mussel lines better. He fashioned a mussel cleaner from an old agitator washing machine and a machine that made plastic floats for holding and marking mussel lines in the water. He created a gyroscope fashioned from a Triumph Herald differential (a type of gearbox connected to the drive shaft and axle, which helps cars to turn) to spin the floats in the water. For about a decade Yealands and his 12 staff worked around the clock in shifts from his garage in Grovetown, making thousands of floats and selling them throughout New Zealand and Australia.
Despite being "a fraction Heath Robinson" the business thrived. In his best month he turned over half a million dollars. "He's just an extraordinary innovator, with such tenacity, and the balls to get up and have a go," says Hearn. "The whole family was. They'd get an idea at 10 o'clock at night and by five o'clock in the morning it was built." Yealands' innovations were handy around the house too.
Vai recalls how the young family of three, then living in a rented farm cottage, needed a small truck. Yealands took the back seats off their 1936 Chevy and turned it into a flat-deck truck. He fixed a slipping belt on her agitator washing machine by up-ending it and applying honey. "He's just a typical Kiwi bloke who, when a problem comes up, knows how to fix it." He also liked a bargain. Daughter Danielle recalls her dad coming home with gallons of red paint that he'd bought from the Government Stores Board because it was cheap.
"Every vehicle in the Yealands fleet was painted Post Office red, and even some of the interior walls of the house. I remember feeling a bit embarrassed being dropped off at Brownies [in those vehicles]." Yealands has always had an eye for a good opportunity. After dabbling briefly and less successfully in scallops, he sold out of his manufacturing business and spent the 1990s successfully breeding and farming deer.
With a business partner, Peter Way, he set up Oakridge deer stud and produced Marlborough's first deer embryo transplants. He also bought Kaiuma Station, 30km from Havelock, and established the now-5000ha Kaiuma Park Estate as a deer farm, although it does run some sheep and cattle.
While developing Kaiuma - he cleared the hilly, shrubby land himself on his beloved bulldozer - he discovered a talent for "sculpting" the land. What followed were a series of developments: a 215-section subdivision with an 18-hole golf course, a 92-berth marina on Kaiuma, of which nearly 60 have sold, a picturesque lake and a 20ha vineyard from a swampy strip of land near Grovetown, and a 160ha vineyard on the northern bank of the Wairau River, which he later sold to brewing giant Fosters for more than $13 million.
Meanwhile, Seaview has even been attracting busloads of visitors. Spread across rolling foothills at the base of the seaward Kaikoura ranges, 800ha of the property is planted in grapes, making it the country's largest privately owned vineyard. Being Marlborough, the grapes are mostly sauvignon blanc but there are also pinot gris and pinot noir, riesling, gewurztraminer and viognier. It's a typical Yealands venture, full of new ideas and bold aims. Within the first year the estate aims to become the first large-scale vineyard in the world to generate its own power through wind generators. It will sell power to the national grid.
Yealands has invested big time in making the venture as sustainable as possible using solar power, water recycling and energy management software. He aims to achieve a six Green Star Rating under the industrial building rating system, making it the first compliant winery in New Zealand. He's even training sheep to eat only the grass in the vineyard, in an environmentally friendly effort to cut back on grass mowing and weed spray.
"You're a bloody long time dead, eh, so you've got to make the most of it while you're alive. I'm constantly looking for new ways to do things, it's nice to break new ground." Despite all the high-tech stuff, the venture is still a family affair. Son Aaron, a mechanic, manages the workshop while Vai does the books from a tiny office at the back of the house.
The Yealands of today is different to the Yealands of old. While his push these days is for sustainability, in the 80s he was logging native trees for manufacture into disposable knickers in Taiwan. He acknowledges his "ratbag past", but says "back then, no one thought about the environment".
Now he's making amends. The new winery is not his first environmentally friendly foray - the Kaiuma subdivision has a ban on cats to protect the native birds, and cutting trees for firewood is prohibited.
Also, since setting up his deer farm, the once keen hunter finds he can no longer shoot them. Says Vai: "He'd get them in the spotlights and watch, and when they turned away he'd turn away and look for something else." One thing he hasn't done yet though, is get rid of the gas-guzzling Chevy Blazer he drives around the vineyard. "I've been told I have to though," he sighs.
Talking about wine isn't really him. He didn't even drink the stuff until setting up his first vineyard. A pint of Stonecutter beer, the darker the better, is more Yealands' style, but he's now not averse to the odd glass of gewurtztraminer.
The sweeter wines are a good start for people who don't like wine, he reckons, and he's even managed to get a couple of mates to down a glass of riesling. He's also got an idea for a TV ad to encourage more "average" Kiwi men to drink more wine - preferably produced by his vineyards of course.
"You get a guy pouring a glass of wine, he swirls it around, sniffs and sips, and then starts talking about gooseberries and whatever. Then you show an average bloke pouring, this time into a normal glass. He takes a sip and he just says, 'I like that'.
No going on about it, he just likes it." It's not a patch on the classic Speights "good on ya mate" drover, but it's straightforward and no-frills, a bit like Yealands himself. He's not entirely comfortable talking about himself either, but eventually warms to it. He's been asked to speak at the next Thrive New Zealand event, an annual business-focused talkfest run by the Employers and Manufacturers Federation.
"My first thoughts were no I don't want to do it, but [I'll be] all right once I've started. A couple of times I've sat in the car in the carpark [before an event] wondering 'what the hell am I doing here?"' Public speaking is something he's had to get used to of late thanks to his success, but also because of an ongoing legal stoush with premier winemaker Oyster Bay Marlborough Vineyards, which is owned by Auckland's Delegat family. He made a takeover bid for OBMV in 2005, after claiming he discovered the company was barely profitable. The bid failed, but he hasn't given up. "My aim is to bring the truth. I don't mind taking it on myself.
I like to get things finished ... even if I'm proved wrong, fine, [at least] it's finished." It's not the first time Yealands has butted heads. He fell out with his brothers and father over the share structure of the mussel business. The shared company dissolved and Stephen, Kevin and Keith set up their own partnership called Marlborough Mussels, selling out nearly 30 years later for $25 million. The family rift, which lasted some years, has since been patched up and Yealands cheerfully describes their relationship now as being "there when we need each other and at loggerheads all the other times". He was a "fair arsehole" at school, he says, grinning, but isn't keen to elaborate further.
Kevin is though, laughing as he recalls the story of how his brother took the family's pet magpie to school and sat with it warbling away in the back of the classroom. When the teacher insisted he put the bird out the window of the two-storey classroom, Yealands suggested the teacher go that way too. Shortly afterward it was "suggested" Yealands leave school. So he did.
When reminded, Yealands laughs and retells the story himself. "That was McLetchie, he taught algebra and I didn't like algebra. I just didn't get on with him." Danielle, who lives in Karamea, north of Westport, says her father isn't one to hold back on his opinions.
"He's quite a strong character." When she set up her business as a body alignment specialist, he thought she was "absolutely mad" to set up such a "pie in the sky" (her words) business, but he has since changed his opinion.
"The proof was in the pudding," she says. "People would keep coming, eventually he'd [suggest] his workers [come] along. He wouldn't put himself on the line if he thought he'd be embarrassed by something. I think he's quite proud of it now."
Vai says her husband is determined but even-tempered. "Nothing gets him down for very long, he never gets in a bad mood, or if he does he never shows it. He never [went] off the deep end with the children, yelling and shouting at them." He's not changed much since she met him. Then 22 and working at the Nelson telephone exchange, Vai met her 19-year-old husband-to-be at a beach where he was hanging out with two mates. "I looked at this one and I looked at that one and settled on Peter because he was more my sort of person.
Quiet and unassuming." Those who know Yealands worry about the effect his seemingly boundless drive to achieve bigger and better things has on his health. "He's the kind of guy who if you visit on a Sunday, he's out on his earthmover while the operator's on holiday," says Kevin.
"I say to him, 'do you want to be the wealthiest corpse in the cemetery?"' Vai reckons her husband's starting to think about easing his workload, now that a lot of his plans are reaching fruition. He's had two operations for a hernia, in 2001 and 2002, and her voice contains a hint of exasperation as she describes how, after picking him up from one operation, he went straight back to work. "I growled and frowned, but you say your piece and it goes in one ear and out the other. He said he took it carefully and wasn't being stupid though."
Yealands himself admits he's not very good at looking after himself, that he could eat less and get more exercise, but he's extremely proud of fact that he was never a smoker.
"I might have sucked on 10 cigarettes and half-a-dozen joints when I was young. They never did anything to me. My mates did it, but to me it seemed madness."
So if he could have his time over again, would he do anything differently? Probably not. "I don't look back a lot. I never take photos, never take videos, don't have a video library of what I have done, I've never bothered about it. I don't lie in bed thinking about all the things I've done - I think about all the things I'm going to do. The cup is always half-full." And it's clear what he'd rather be doing.
"I got arseholed out of the office the other day [by general manager Jason Judkins], got told 'get out and do something productive'. I thought 'good, I can go and do a day's work'."
