Days of Wine & Rosie

Rosie Dunphy realized she was serious about owning a vineyard after spending a year commuting from dublin to sussex to take a viticulture course.

Words: Kate Coughlan   Photographs: Aaron McLean

THE BLACK LABRADORS Guinness and Stella are lolloping about among the vines, wickedly scoffing low-hanging bunches of pinot noir grapes behind Rosie’s back. Grapes are dynamite for dogs apparently, something to do with their kidneys, so she calls them away. The fermented product of Rosie’s pinot noir and sauvignon blanc vines, however, has been pronounced delicious for humans by experts at recent awards including the Air New Zealand Wine Awards and the New Zealand International Wine Awards (silver for the pinot noir on both occasions).

Around the big stone outdoor fireplace she had built for such occasions, Rosie (below right) is serving plates of lasagne to her grape pickers. The platter is huge and luckily so as the chilled pickers are hungry. There are 10 of them and though based in Riverton, near Invercargill, they are almost all from various parts of Asia. It’s a cracking Central Otago morning with a frost in the valley but not on the vine-covered hillside 20km inland from Queenstown where Rosie’s Coal Pit Vineyard is to be found. The trees are sloughing off their golden leaves in gentle drifts.

Feeding the grape pickers is a lovely vineyard custom and one that Rosie – who is accomplished in her Auckland life as a hands-on mother – fulfils without turning a hair. The harvest finished this morning and the pickers are happily sampling the 2007 Coal Pit sauvignon blanc and pinot noir and speculating what the fruits of their labours will taste like in a year’s time.

Rosie and husband-and-wife team of viticulturalist Gary Crabbe and winemaker Lynn Horton (left of photograph) have the highest hopes for this vintage. They’ve picked good tonnage of clean, flavoursome fruit. “And,” says an excited Rosie, “with the new winery it is straight into the vats within half an hour of picking. This is how to control the quality levels of the wine. Clean fruit with good flavour and minimal handling can make great wine.”

The new winery, under construction literally around and above the fruits of this year’s harvest, was designed by Wellington architect Chris Kelly. It is, says Rosie, a luxury on a vineyard of this size but her dream of creating very good wine for a select local and export market is easier to fulfil with her own winery. She spent three full-time years studying advanced urban horticulture at the Ryde School of Horticulture in Sydney while she, her husband and their four (then young) children lived in Australia. Then the family moved to Ireland and opportunities to study horticulture locally were not available. So for a year she commuted each week, all the way from Dublin to Sussex, to complete her studies at the Plumpton School of Viticulture.

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