NZW Fellow
NZW’s 2021 Fellows
From making strides in wine governance to adding sparkle to New Zealand’s wine industry, John Clarke, Steve Smith MW, Andy Frost, Rudi Bauer, and Daniel and Adele Le Brun have made an outstanding contribution. The New Zealand Winegrowers (NZW) Fellows for 2021 have all worked over many decades for the “betterment of the wine industry”, says NZW Chief Executive Philip Gregan. Steve Smith – for service to NZW, WINZ and other initiatives WILD BILLY McRae was known for bootlegged whiskey out of Southland, with Hokonui Moonshine said to compare with Scotland’s best. Fast forward a century or so, and one of Billy’s descendants is known for fine wines instead, with a 40-year legacy in New Zealand’s wine industr y. “I like to be challenged by things,” says Steve Smith MW, perhaps sharing a trait with his notorious ancestor. “My natural instinct is not to do things the way everyone else has done them.” Steve was the first viticulturist in the world to become a Master of Wine, co- founded and steered Craggy Range for 16 years, and launched Smith & Sheth with United States billionaire and environmental philanthropist Brian Sheth five years ago. A
year later, the duo – passionate about forging extraordinary wines from extraordinary places – purchased the iconic Pyramid Valley followed by Lowburn Ferry. “As I was finishing up at Craggy I thought about ‘what is it I want to feel like as an 80 year old?’” Steve says. “I decided that having the opportunity to be a curator of properties like Pyramid Valley and Lowburn with Brian, and to create something pretty special - truly focussed on the fine wine space in New Zealand - really drives me.” It’s a realm that deserves far more respect, “and I spent my career trying to do that”. That career has been punctuated by the influence of mentors, starting when he was 17 years old, and shelved dreams of being an architect too costly for the boy from rural
Steve Smith MW
Canterbury - instead doing an internship at the Ruakura Research Centre in Hamilton, which had just started looking at phylloxera in grapevines. While there, he met Richard Smart, who’d been appointed as Viticultural Research Scientist
• Wine and grape analysis
for New Zealand and was “a very influential person for me”, he says. After doing a New Zealand Certificate of Science through Waikato Polytechnic and postgraduate studies in horticultural experimentation at Lincoln University, Steve EU Wine export approved
• Wine microbiology - including PCR testing with vinoBRETT • Lab chemicals and supplies • Fermentation products • Technical information
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NZ WINEGROWER DECEMBER 2021/JANUARY 2022