What does 'people are drinking more but better' mean? (Part 2)
Ok, fuck it, I'm gonna talk about race.
But first, some shameless self promotion! July and August have been busy and I have started doing some work for Reece and Robyn at The Wine Auction Room (and Wine Storage Room), Aotearoa’s most trusted specialist wine auction house. This includes a project where I get to look at years of sales data to analyse secondary market trends around New Zealand wine. We’ve just published our first Special Market Report looking at the prices of New Zealand Pinot Noir at auction over the past five years. If you’re reading this substack you’re probably a bit of a geek so I think you’ll find it interesting, and if you’ve ever thought about investing in New Zealand wine it’s a must read!
Also, we’ve had some big and exciting changes at Known Unknown and among other cool things, we’ve just released a really cool New Zealand first: a perfume inspired by one of our rosé wines, made in collaboration with Only Good Things, an awesome boutique, family owned Tāmaki Makaurau-based fragrance house. It’s called The Wild Unknown at we introduced it to the public last weekend with some amazing feedback and will be shipping pre-orders from Monday.
So (only one ‘o’ this time), last time we looked at some of the downsides of the idea that people are drinking less but better, namely the challenges to individual growers and the current model of the NZ wine industry (and the volume wine industry in other markets. There are upsides too of course, but even these are not without challenges. I have worked in wine for 20 years and over this time I have made it my mission to try and make wine fun, engaging and accessible to all… especially to new consumers.1
My logic here is simple. More wine drinkers equals more demand for wine. Rising tide. Yada, yada. In short, grow the pie rather than fight over an ever-shrinking slice of it or worse, complain loudly about how there used to be so much more pie. Geddit?
This can be achieved on multiple levels:
Grow export markets,
Engage young consumers,
Engage consumers that have been overlooked by the wine establishment.
Pricing is fundamental to this, interesting starter wine needs to be within financial reach of new consumers. If premiumisation runs riot and cheap wine ceases to exist it becomes increasingly hard to get new consumers to engage with wine and we’re back to the shrinking pie (which is what everyone was moaning about in the first place).
I’ve mentioned this before but wine is pretty, well, white. Emphasise the WH-.
WH-ite.
However there is an exciting and growingly important segment of the NZ market that is resonating with consumers both here in Aotearoa and also abroad; namely, wines made by Māori winemakers.
For context, in the US, there is a strong movement to platform and support indigenous, black and latinx owned wineries. And for good reason. Not only are these producers making exciting wine but they are at the cliff face of engaging with and bringing new consumers into wine. This is absolutely vital work that the whole industry is benefiting from. They are telling consumers that have been overlooked by the rest of the industry that wine is, in fact, for them.
And, as mentioned, the US is far and away our biggest export market for our wine. Wines made by Māori winemakers, by Māori owned business and on Māori owned land are having a moment. They have been featured in some of the biggest and more influential magazines: Food & Wine (2025), Wine Enthusiast (2022) and in one of my favourite more trade focused publications, Punch (2024). One of the reasons for this is that these wines resonate with both new and existing wine consumers.
This is happening throughout the Māori economy. Even in trying economic times Māori owned business (both those owned by larger post-treaty settlement entities but also independently owned business that happen to have Māori owners) have shown such strong growth that in March RNZ reported that the Māori contribution to the NZ economy has surpassed $100b, five years earlier than anticipated and now represents almost 9% of the New Zealand GDP.
Wine is important to this sector, for multiple reasons. Among other things, it is a great use of land that can’t be used for other agricultural endeavours AND it’s a driver of high-value tourism.2 And it’s be being acknowledged, with TUKU, a collective of Māori owned wineries winning the Kāuta Producer of the Year Awards.
If you want to have a look at some of these super-cool producers, read the articles and go to their websites and buy their wines. I can personally recommend Huntress, Kurukuru and Tawhiti but there are many others.
But that’s not my point. Premiumisation is not just about high prices. And in a way it’s not about price at all.
Premiumisation is really about being extremely good at one thing, focusing in on this and marketing your product in a way that makes this appealing to consumers. With trad-core wine it could be ‘we are the best at doing this one thing’ or ‘we have the longest legacy of doing this one thing’. It’s about becoming ultra-niche and in turn charging more for the experience.
Māori owned wine brands appeal to consumers for many reasons. Understandably, many Māori wine consumers here in NZ (plus indigenous and POC wine consumers in other markets) will choose to support businesses whose owners and makers they can relate more to than say, another white guy in a suit. They may share a common heritage or just a similar story.3 Likewise, they might feel that supporting a business owned by another minority means better representation for other minorities and also supporting a business that is more likely to value and adds value to its community, the same reason many small businesses urge people to ‘buy local’. There may also be a spirit of resistance and empowerment, I’m sure it must feel thrilling to be able to buy a product you love and enjoy off a business owned by someone who shares your background for the very first time.4 When it comes to wine, this is especially apropos given the long history of Pākehā owned wineries using and appropriating Māori culture to sell wine overseas.
And there are other reasons people buy these products. For example, more environmentally conscious consumers might be attracted to a brand story that puts the winemakers connection and spiritual relationship to the land at centre stage while some social-justice conscious consumers may also want to support these brands simply to show support of the important role that Māori play in society and to be good tangata Tiriti, using their spending power as a way of pushing back against current government policy.
I bring this up not to suggest that wine producers who can’t claim this kaupapa, colonise or appropriate it for their own (just the opposite in fact). But we can use it as a jumping off point to tell our own stories.
Just as Pākehā have a lot to learn from Māori ways of being, we also have a lot to learn from Māori business. The RNZ article mentioned earlier is proof of this, “The Māori asset base has grown from $69 billion in 2018 to $126 billion in 2023”. 83% growth in five years, those are Deloitte Fast 50 numbers!
I’ve written (at length, sorry) about culture / heritage as one niche that could be leveraged, but identity isn’t the only niche an individual winemaker could use to stand out from the noise. Likewise, while the story is different we could have equally talked about amazing Japanese winemakers like Hiro Kusuda, Takaki Okada, Yoshi & Kyoko Sato and Takahiro Koyama all of whom make exceptional wines here in NZ, largely for a Japanese audience.
My point here, is that if these trends carry on there is huge opportunity for many winemakers here in Aotearoa to tell a niche brand story and to find new customers in unlikely places. The success of this requires growing demand rather than fighting for scraps.
In a way, this brings us back to my shameless self promotion. On a personal level I’m in the process of resetting my personal brand somewhat, as the ongoing health issues caused by my car crash a few years force me to live a different lifestyle (including what I do for work)5. In relation to Known Unknown, we are also in the process of trying to refocus in on ourselves as a fun, off-beat, rule-breaker of a wine brand that doesn’t take wine or itself seriously. So what better way to do this than to collaborate on a wine-inspired perfume, a product that is a first in the New Zealand market or to host wine-themed dance parties rather than traditional wine dinners.
Wine of the week: 2024 Tawhiti Ōwhiro Gamay / Pinot Noir ($50)
💕 - Exceptional
I’m gonna start this by saying that this is probably the best ‘natural’ wine I’ve tasted this year; packed full of intense pure fruit expression, great texture and amazing energy. This wine is everything well made natural wine is all about.
It’s also the first of a series of wines to be released that are an accidental blend of Gamay and Pinot Noir (Easthope also have one) because, last year New Zealand lost a significant amount of its Gamay crop almost overnight.
Could it have been a freak hailstorm that only hit vineyards planted in Gamay? Was it a very discerning and very rare Gamay mite? No on both counts.
Turns out, it had been Pinot Noir the whole time! It was discovered that Gamay plantings at Rippon, some of the oldest Gamay plantings in Aotearoa and plantings that produced what was widely considered one of the finest Gamay’s outside of Beaujolais)were in fact Pinot Noir. These were also used as vinestock for several other vineyard plantings as the market became more interested in Gamay. My understanding is that this was first noticed by a French ampelographer6 who visited the vineyard and was then confirmed by DNA testing.7
While blending Pinot and Gamay is unconventional, the varieties are closely related so much so it’s hard to tell them apart and in part because they come from a single vineyard (Two Terraces) and were treated as one parcel the result is a seamless blend of the juicy, forward fruit of the Gamay pivoting into rich, earthy Pinot Noir complexity. An truly delicious and energetic wine - I can’t wait to see more of what Tawhiti has in store for us (2024 was their second vintage).
Hell, my first furtive in-print wine writing was in a student mag.
For context iwi have significant holdings in both the tourism and accomodation sectors.
One example that removes race from the equation is the affinity between Irish Republicans and Palestinians.
Something I can take for granted as a Pākehā person.
I’ve been self employed for the better part of ten years so work and lifestyle are closely (too closely) intermingled.
Ampelography is the study of grape leaf identification.
Is that why Rippon Gamay was so dammed good?