With a wine in one hand and a computer in the other...

Making wine is the easy part. The hard part is selling it. The times are changing and wineries are going to have to change their methods to keep up. WineBusiness.com recently published an interesting article by Liz Thach entitled Tips to Market Wine to Millenials. It seems that getting through to the young folk of today its all about reaching them ONLINE above anything else. Something that NZ wineries are not very good at doing, at least not yet. Read on...

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To cut a long story short, the millennial generation is massive, growing and wine loving - but how to attract them to your product ? When buying it seems they value speed, reliability, friction free transactions, honesty and convenience. Price is not the major driver.

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The majority of purchasing decisions are based on word of mouth which come from either face-to-face, online social networking or texting. When asked what type of wine advertising and promotion works best, the Millennials cited online marketing (Facebook, blogs etc) in first place and wine events as second.

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Just a look at the online stats shows where the future lies. Most use Facebook and update at least twice a day, Twitter is popular but second to texting for short messages. 90% own cellphones and text on average 500/month. Email is old hat. A third have a blog and half read blogs. They watch huge amounts of online videos (eg Youtube) and forward to friends often. They spend more time online than in front of TV and use their phones almost as much as computers to connect to the Internet.

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Ive just done a spellcheck on this blogpost and my computer has highlighted 'millennials', 'facebook', 'texting' and 'youtube'. If it cant keep up what chance have I, wheres my pipe and slippers?

New Zealands best unsigned band...

The Hustle
Listen here - http://www.box.net/shared/9vp6cvkufr

Celebrating a Great Vintage...

It all added up to a brilliant day recently when Sandihurst held its first annual End of Vintage celebration inside the winery...

take an empty winery...

cook up a storm...

a traditional Potjiekos meal...

invite alot of people...

serve it up...

a little conversation...

a dash of great music...

a firing squad for people misbehaving...

and an auction for a good cause (the Westpac Rescue Helicopter)

Riesling 2008...

Recent review from Jo Burzynska in The New Zealand Herald 12-6-09

Sandihurst Waipara Riesling 2008 $22.50

Sandihurst is a winery based in West Melton, a Canterbury sub-region that's a mere 20 minutes from central Christchurch. Sourcing fruit from across the South Island, this fragrant low-alcohol riesling is from its Waipara vineyard, brimming with succulent stone fruit and mandarin, combined with blossom, spice and mineral over a fresh lemony core.

Corked! - another wine movie...

Hot on the heels of Bottle Shock, Sideways, A Good Year and any other wine movie you can think of comes Corked!, a mockumentary-style film about the Californian wine industry. Click the links to read reviews from the LA Times or Hollywood Reporter or even from the movies own Facebook page.

你好 Sandihurst...

Its not often the words 'high ranking official from Beijing' and 'Sandihurst Winery' go hand in hand but so it was yesterday when a visiting Chinese trade delegation rounded off their tour to New Zealand with a visit and tasting at our winery.
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Pictured above, with winery owners Hennie and Celia Bosman, is the highest of those officials, Vice Minister Zhi Shuping of "General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine of the People's Republic of China (AQSIQ)".
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Quite timely as we work towards our wines beign available in mainland China.

Bienvenido a Sandihurst...

Last spring at Sandihurst we hosted Chileans Sebastián Pérez-Canto Orellana and Jimena Cordovez of Andeswine.com as part of their Wine Tourism series from around the world. As well as tasting our wines and looking through the winery they were also quite taken with our ground breaking vineyard trial using recycled crushed glass as a reflective mulch. The above video is the result of their time with us. Disfrutar !

Testing, testing...

Just checking the 2009 Sandihurst Waipara Riesling for heat stability. Its a standard test that (nearly) all wineries do. Most white wines have Bentonite added to them in order to confer stability on the proteins found in wine. Unstable proteins, once too warm, give the wine an unsightly haze.

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Bentonite is a clay, basically an aluminium silicate, that when dispersed in water exists as minute flat plates. We add the Bentonite, in the order of 1-2g/L or thereabouts and mix the tank thoroughly. The positively charged proteins then attach themselves to the negatively charged and heavier Bentonite plates before falling to the bottom of the tank. We generally filter the now-stable wine to another tank. discarding the lees at the bottom.

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The test for stability used here is simple. A 0.45u filtered sample is kept in a water bath at 80C for 6 hours and then cooled/observed for haze. As seen above this Riesling, after an addition of 1.2g/L, still exhibited a little haze so will need more Bentonite added.

Harnessing the Power of Rats...

A short clip showing how we empty our fermenters into the press once all the 'free run' wine has been pumped out. Its gentle on the fruit, no pumps here, but does involve a bit of muscle and the wine is generally quite cold on bare feet at this point. But of course that is why God invented Cellar Rats.

We love cork...

Good to see the occasional article in support of the mighty cork. Such support is a bit rare down here in New Zealand where something approaching 95% of all wine is under screwcap. But thanks to the beauty of the internet we can read newspapers such as the Miami Herald who's article today Good Cap Bad Cap looks beyond the bottle to the environmental issues of cork.

Tools of the Trade...

The three crucial things you need when you are digging out the skins from a Pinot Noir fermenter - not unlike a day at the beach - bucket spade and clean feet !

Well done us...

Just to mention that two of our wines, the 2007 Central Otago Pinot Noir and the 2007 Nelson Riesling, were both awarded a SILVER medal at the Selections Mondiales Des Vins, North Americas largest wine competition.