About

Winemaker Toby Gillman discovered his passion for wine many years ago as a student, while pitching in voluntarily at a vineyard. In fact, he spent his first student allowance on a bottle of Matakana wine.

Toby soon fell in love with the idea of making wine himself. He and his father John volunteered their labour at New Zealand’s iconic Providence vineyard. For the next decade, they spent their weekends receiving practical experience by day and educating their palates by night, when the winemaker would repay their labour with excellent dinners and bottles of wine from his cellar of rare French wines.

In 1997, Toby travelled to Bordeaux where he spent a vintage working at premier grand cru Chateau Angelus to learn first hand how the finest Bordeaux wine is made. While he was there, he became known as “L’espion”, or ‘The Spy’, due to the amount of notes and photographs he took!

On his return in 1998, the Gillman family began to work towards their dream by establishing their vineyard and winery, in New Zealand’s north island Matakana region. Their aim was and still is to make the finest wine in the country using Old World techniques perfected in the vineyards of Bordeaux to make small quantities of exceptional wine.

The result is that we can now offer you one of New Zealand’s finest red wines, with a premium, hand-made blend of cabernet franc, merlot, and malbec in the style of the great chateaux of Bordeaux.

“We make wine that we enjoy drinking – it must be good with food, yet also be approachable and a pure pleasure to drink.”

As great wine can only be made from the highest quality grapes, my father and I searched for two years to find the perfect place to establish our vineyard.

We chose the Matakana region, an hour’s drive north of Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city.

Matakana’s warm summers and low rainfall create ideal conditions for traditional Bordeaux varieties.

Eventually we found our ideal site - a steep north-facing slope of free-draining, iron-rich volcanic clay, which is sheltered from rain by a mountain range and warmed by the nearby Pacific Ocean. Planting began in 1998 and is closely modelled on the finest Bordeaux vineyards. Dense plantings of vines are set close to the earth so the grapes are warmed by heat rising from the clay. Two-thirds of the vineyard is planted in cabernet franc, which thrives in Matakana, producing a wine of great character. The rest is in merlot, with a small amount of malbec.

The vineyard now covers 1.5 acres – “Small enough that I know every vine,” Toby says. “Practically everything is done by hand.”