New Zealand’s wine industry has been in turmoil recently with a spate of high-profile liquidations, including the Te Awanga Estate Winery group.
Winegrowers are facing a supply hangover after a bumper crop in 2025, coupled with a decline in wine consumption.
But despite the challenges facing the industry, Hawke’s Bay wine doyens are confident there are ways to swing around the downturn.
Kim Thorp of Black Barn.
Havelock North’s Black Barn Vineyard co-owner Kim Thorpe said the industry had to be open and honest about the stats.
“Yes, people are drinking less. Younger people aren’t bingeing as much on alcohol and are drinking less, and those that are drinking are in fact drinking less wine.”
He was not sure whether the figures marked a blip or a trend.
“If they’re a blip, we just need to work out how we bunker in and ride through them.
“If they’re a trend, we’ve actually got to probably rethink the way we do things and work out what we are going to do about it for the long term.”
On top of a drop in wine consumption, Thorpe said Mother Nature was an expensive business partner.
“Anything that’s produced naturally, particularly organically, in the world is really expensive from a land point of view, a labour point of view, a weather reliance point of view, all of that sort of thing.”
There were far more cost certainties in making alcoholic drinks such as RTDs than in “letting Mother Nature drive the bus”.
“In most parts of the world, that just is a reality, be it red meat, be it fish, be it produce, and certainly wine. That is an increasingly really expensive thing to do.”
But Thorpe remained positive that wine would return to popularity.
He said research “involving thousands of wineries from many countries” had shown people from the age of 35 were turning to wine as their drink of choice.
“That consumption, though, is increasingly not about bulk consumption. It is about a real appreciation of the wine, what’s in the bottle, but also where it’s from and how it’s made.”
He said the stories that could be told by a glass of cabernet franc about where it was from and how it was made were “endless” compared to those that could be told about any other alcohol.
“I hate to say it, but there’s almost no story in a glass of Aperol Spritz.”
He saw wine tourism as an area of growth and profitability. Over the summer at Black Barn, he had noticed an increase in international tourists at the cellar door wanting to know more about each wine they tasted.
“Maybe it’s an early sign of just an increase in this interest in the magic of the good old bottle of wine.”
Napier winemaker Ollie Powrie. Photo / Richard Brimer
Chateau Garage Wines and Albariño Brothers co-owner and director Ollie Powrie described the position in which the wine industry found itself as “a perfect storm”.
There was pressure on customers’ disposable income because of rising prices, causing a drop in the number of people able to afford wine, mixed with people drinking less and more competition from overseas winemakers.
He believed Hawke’s Bay was “better placed than ever in terms of wine quality”, which he believed was a huge opportunity.
He noted there had been increased global demand for lighter, fresher, aromatic wines, such as sauvignon blanc, the most-planted variety in Hawke’s Bay.
According to NZ Wine, the national organisation for the grape and wine sector, sauvignon blanc is New Zealand’s most widely planted grape, comprising 72% of overall wine production and 86% of exports, with total production totalling 302,000 tonnes.
More than 1000ha of grapes are grown in Hawke’s Bay alone.
Powrie said sauvignon blanc had been oversupplied, causing wine merchants to discount their products, which meant lower profits for growers.
But New Zealand wines were still selling well, and producers should focus on fresher, aromatic wines that were lighter in alcohol to get people excited about wine again, he said.
John (“Mac”) Macpherson at Muse Gallery, Havelock North, in 2021. Photo / Paul Taylor
John (“Mac”) Macpherson, the owner of Havelock North-based wine retailer Advintage, said the industry could do with a marketing facelift, as younger generations did not want to be spoken to in a language that might have excited their parents.
“I think that wine has always tried to pedestal itself as a drink, and I think it’s sort of biting itself in the arse now.”
Telling someone under the age of 30 that they should buy a bottle of wine that was going to “come into its own in five or six years” was a pointless exercise.
Wine should be made for “sheer deliciousness rather than classical structure”, he said.
“We’re seeing some lighter, brighter, fresher styles coming through that seem to be attracting interest in a younger demographic.”
The cynical part of him saw the New Zealand wine industry as less than 1% of world wine production.
There were many small producers “wallowing” in the industry’s struggles.
“I think there’s a lot of ‘We’re artisans, we make it, people should come to us and buy it.’ But in this market, that attitude just won’t work.”
With more young people drinking RTDs, wine in a can or box could be seen as more alluring.
However, the canned wine he had tried so far lacked quality, he said.
He had a deal with his daughter, who is in her 30s, at his store. “If I say no to a product and she says yes, the answer’s yes, because we need to have her view on what people are drinking.”
Macpherson recently brought in alternative drinks, such as limoncello spritz, which customers had been buying and enjoying.
“People are interested in trying something new.”
Jack Riddell is a multimedia journalist with Hawke’s Bay Today and has worked in radio and media in the UK, Germany and New Zealand.
Dining and Cooking