New Zealand's 700 wineries are in the business of making wine - and the world agrees they do it very well - but they have now become a major player in the country's No 1 industry: tourism.
Chris Yorke, global marketing director for New Zealand Winegrowers, says it's only over the past two years that in-depth research has revealed the size and importance of wine-related tourism activities.
That doesn't only mean buying and enjoying wine. It can involve golf, cycling, music and many other pastimes packaged in or "clustered" to the wine experience.
"We'd been looking at wine tourism seriously over the last couple of years," Yorke says, especially after the industry body signed a memorandum of understanding with Tourism New Zealand and Air New Zealand.
When Auckland Airport's annual tourism development grants become available last year, "we thought we'd put in a proposal to allow us to research it in much greater depth."
The grants, now in their fifth year, provide an annual $100,000 seed funding for new products targeting New Zealand's key international tourism markets.
Two $50,000 grants are awarded annually to support the creation, development or "clustering" of experiences that attract international visitors in shoulder seasons - spring and autumn rather than the traditional summer and winter tourism peaks. Application for the 2017 grants can be made here.
From the wine industry's research, Yorke says, the first surprise was capturing the number of wine-related enterprises and experiences, then the importance of those to international visitors.
"We have 10 major wine regions from Northland to Central Otago. We have in total 700 wineries in New Zealand - 243 of those have cellar doors, 74 have winery restaurants and 69 have accommodation. So we have a lot of experiences there.
"And there's probably the same amount of combined experiences - like music or art, or sailing or cycling or golf adventures with wine."
Because the industry has grown so much in the past 12 years - from $300m of exports to $1.6b to looking to hit $2b by 2020 - many wineries haven't understood their cellar door is also a tourism business, Yorke says.
A key step will be communicating that to the industry and potential visitors.
"Of those 243 cellar doors, only 163 are on TripAdvisor. The wineries on TripAdvisor have a score of over 4.6, so they do well."
Only 105 are listed on their regional tourism organisation website and only 51 are on newzealand.com. Yorke says: "There's a lot of work we need to do internally in terms of promoting and increasing the skills of our wineries."
In July-August, the industry body plans to launch nzwine.com/visit, where visitors and locals will be able to find out about all wine tourism experiences.
Yorke quotes recent Tourism NZ international visitor data: "If you look at the analysis of all visitors who came to New Zealand over the last three years, 24 per cent visited a winery. But if you look at the people who had a cycling or a golf visit, that rises to 42 per cent, so there's a really strong correlation between certain activities.
"It makes sense to cluster those together. For example, in Hawkes Bay there's the Takaro Trails, a gastronomic tour where you cycle around the region and visit wineries and includes accommodation and dining.
"In Central Otago there's Remarkable Golf Tours in which you can play golf, eat at restaurants, tour regional wineries tours plus a 'meet the chef' lunch at Amisfield.
"Cloudy Bay has a Sail Away package where you sail, wine and dine; Waiheke has the seaplanes that take you to Man o' War vineyard and so on.
"I think these combining of experiences is really what people are looking to do."
These are year-round opportunities, too: "Particularly with our cellar doors, you can meet the winemaker, you can try the wines, you can have something good to eat and have an authentic New Zealand experience."
"There's a number of festivals, marathons in the vines, music in the vines ... all types of events."
He credits the Auckland Airport grant with kick-starting "the visibility" of wine tourism. "What we're now looking to do is take it to the next step.
"The international visitor data has shown just how important the wine experience is to people who come here, and the other thing is putting all the information together in one place so those experiences are easily found."