DAD

A few months after I turned 50 we lost my father, John. I don’t remember being bothered by turning 30 or 40, but 50 did shake me a little. I didn’t have anything approaching a mid-life crisis, but it did make me think about how the rest of my life was likely to go. And one of the things that gave me hope rather than crushing despair was the example that Dad set for us. When Dad hit 50 he had three year-old toddler me running around the house. He still had twenty years of an illustrious medical career ahead of him. It would have never occurred to him that he would be the founder of a celebrated vineyard decades in the future.

Mum and Dad loved wine. I suspect they loved gin & tonic more, but they definitely loved wine, and in an era in New Zealand when it was hard to be a wine-lover. To find any wine of quality, the wine enthusiast really had to look offshore – and Mum and Dad were nothing if not enthusiastic.

I can’t remember exactly when I inherited this interest in wine myself - at first it was just the usual inappropriate interest in all things alcoholic. But it soon became clear that there was something different about wine. Dad would ask what you thought about the wine; you were expected to have an opinion about the wine. Most importantly that meant, in our family, you could have an argument about the wine.

Still, even 30 years ago, lots of people in Auckland enjoyed drinking wine. The family first became involved in winemaking (without me) in the late 80s when Dad and my sister Sarah went to help Jim Vuletic with the harvest at the pioneering Antipodean vineyard in Matakana. In 1990 he volunteered to help Jim plant Providence vineyard. I don’t remember being that enthusiastic about the idea, but Dad had volunteered me as well. Dad was always looking for things for us to do together. I was never the practical one in the family - it was Campbell who had the natural ability to understand how things worked, Sarah who followed Dad into medicine, and Emma who was the sensible one. I really, really sucked at golf. But I surprised myself by enjoying helping to create something real, in spite of the mud and the rain that weekend, and it turned out to be a great way to enjoy time with Dad - working in the vineyard all day, before returning to Auckland for dinner and wine, lots and lots of really fine wine.

Meanwhile, Dad was finally reaching what he thought to be an appropriate retirement age from surgery. He had been looking forward to finally having enough time to play all the golf he wanted, but when retirement came I think he discovered that golf wasn’t enough to fill what had been an incredibly busy and rewarding working life. 

At this point I was envisioning setting up a vineyard of my own one day at some time in the far-off future, but it was Mum who recognised how much Dad enjoyed working at the vineyard, and came up with the idea that they should sell up in Auckland, and find suitable land in Matakana.

Things didn’t go completely to Mum’s plan. For one thing, Dad and I were determined that before we planted, we had to find a site that was perfect in every way to produce the quality of grapes we wanted. Nothing we looked at was good enough. Eventually, when we couldn’t find anything on the market we wanted, we resorted to driving around the entire district, looking for a suitable slope angling towards the sun. Once we spotted something promising, we would jump the fence and surreptitiously dig down with a posthole borer so we could have a look at the sub-soil and work out if we should approach the farmer and see if he wanted to sub-divide. After two years of this sort of carry-on, we heard about a site in Sharp Road that would eventually become Gillman Vineyard.

Mum also had the idea that they would establish themselves in Matakana first, and in the indeterminate future I would start planting a vineyard. Dad had other ideas. We ordered vines before we even paid a deposit on the land, and the vines went in only a few months after the house was finished in 1998.

And that was the start of another chapter in Dad’s life at the precocious age of 74. When I remember my perfect days with Dad, I think of us in the barrel room racking the wine. Dad will be perched on his stool, being careful to sample each barrel for “quality control”.  In between flurries of activity, there is a lot of standing around and talking rubbish. At some point we will start to discuss what to drink with dinner, and I will pull bottles off the racks overhead as suggestions. At the end of the day, while I’m cleaning up, Dad will go inside to start the fire before dinner. I’ve been lucky to have so many of those days. And together we created something real. We may not be the biggest vineyard in New Zealand, and certainly not the most profitable. But I honestly feel that Dad and I, with the rest of our friends and family, have made some of the finest wines to come from Aotearoa.

It’s been an adventure Dad, and I am so grateful I got to go on it with you.

Toby