URBAN WINERY

Jane and the 'Concrete Egg' fermenter.

Widely regarded for its boutique charm the town has recently welcomed Jane Cooper’s Alexia winery, built in 2019 on a site less than a km from the town centre.

With experience in Nelson as well as the Wairarapa and Hawke’s Bay, Jane was chief winemaker and General Manager for Masterton’s Matahiwi Estate for a number of years, while also making her own wines from both Wairarapa fruit and that from other regions.

“A boutique winery within Greytown was a long-held ambition of mine and by a moment of luck, as much as design, in 2017 I stumbled across a derelict industrial site on the edge of town. It was an ideal situation being within the town boundaries but with industrial zoning.”

“It was really just a derelict tin shed containing all the sorts of rubbish you get when land is neglected; car tyres, bottles, shopping trolleys and even a row of cinema seats!”

Jane and her wife Lesley sold the contents on TradeMe for $1 on condition that whoever bought it had to take it all away. The native beams went for domestic housing, the corrugated iron for a movie set and reinforcing steel for a bridge. The site they had found for their urban winery dream they now share with both suburban housing and light industrial businesses. 2020 was to be their first vintage and both certainly had to work hard to get everything ready. They did as much of the work themselves even laying the cooling lines! Luckily they were able to get some of the Pinot Noir in before lockdown but the rest of the vintage was harvested by ourselvesNow Alexia offers a truly individual visitor experience. All the processes of wine making are carried out on the premises and the community is welcome to visit.

Says Jane, “The local reception has been rewarding. We ran a ‘Pie and Pinot’ celebration in the summer – a local bakery and our Pinot - which drew in more than 300 local enthusiasts. We’re looking at running something similar on a monthly basis during the next summer.

Alexia harvested 20 tonnes for 2021 and Jane remarks that like the rest of the country, vintage was a little down, but that quality was good. “I’d like to see us press 30 -50 tonnes in the coming years.”

Similar to other Wairarapa wineries Alexia’s range carries a flagship Wairarapa Pinot Noir as well as a locally sourced Rosé and Sauvignon Blanc and a Hawke’s Bay Chardonnay.

But their ‘Tangent’ wines are a little apart; described as wines that ‘explore something different without losing touch with where the line is drawn.’ It’s a range for which there are no additions except for sulphur and includes Gamay, Chenin Blanc, Cabernet Franc and a multi varietal rosé.

In many ways Alexia’s urban winery harks back to those Henderson pioneers whose companies grew as much from the fruit and vegetables they supplied to the community as the early wines they made.