Winepress - April 2023

Trucking On

The busy business of moving vintage

SOPHIE PREECE

AS MARLBOROUGH’S Sauvignon Blanc harvest steps up, there’s a steady flow of trucks, night and day, getting grapes from vineyards to wineries. MOVe Freight operations manager Steve Runciman begins preparing many months before the hustle of harvest, ensuring the company’s bins – not used since last vintage – are cleaned and repaired early on. Meanwhile, he works with trucking companies south of Blenheim to ensure 20 units - many of them from Canterbury - are contracted for vintage.

As part of their training, drivers are schooled up on moving a “live load” of grapes, which slosh around in the tub. “Our main rule is that drivers need to be prepared to stop at every roundabout and we tell them to take their time,” says Steve. But all the caution in the world can be outdone by a pedestrian or car moving unexpectedly, he adds, welcoming the flashing sign on State Highway 1, from Waka Kotahi, cautioning other drivers to keep wine traffic in mind this vintage.

Once available, grower and winery harvest dates are planned for in detail. But despite the best planning, “there’s always the unknown”, says MOVe Freight branch manager Steve Smith. “A breakdown slowing up the harvest, or weather changing the plans.” Having good relationships with the growers and trucking contractors they work with goes a long way, he says. This season that includes harvest dates moving later than anticipated, meaning some of the drivers coming from Canterbury cannot stay for the duration, and other plans have had to be made. “The growers try to give us as much notice as they can and we pass that on. And then obviously some things happen outside anyone’s control.”

Labour constraints have not been too bad this year, says Steve Runciman, who works hard to make sure it stays that way. “Having a good relationship with your contractors guarantees you get them back the next year. You look after them, our customers look after them, and you know they’ll want to come back next year, and I think that’s paramount to the success of any operation.”

The 2022 vintage had plenty of challenges, with the Covid-19 Omicron outbreak reducing available drivers and trucks, complicating a harvest already tightened by weather pressures, Steve adds. “Many local operators worked together to ensure as many grapes as possible were harvested for growers.”

Renwick Transport managing director and co-owner Jax Smith coordinates grape harvest work each year with her sister Jen Hall. “Over the whole period of time you make tweaks and change things and try to make it as efficient as you possibly can,” Jax says in her 19th year of harvest trucking logistics. “This pencil and rubber are my best friends for six weeks.”

With 20 trucks working night and day at the peak of harvest, with grape hauls from Kekerengu, Nelson, and high up the Wairau Valley, and grape marc delivered as far away as Murchison and Tutaki for stock feed, it’s a hectic business keeping up with the unexpected, such as harvests running over time or weather changing plans.

And she notes that the actual harvest period is just a fraction of the time spent on vintage logistics at Renwick Transport, which is “realistically a four month process, from the time we start training and organising to when we deliver our last lot of grape marc”.

They’ll start recruiting drivers at the end of the year, and spend the lead up to harvest doing training, health and safety, and induction, so drivers can “hit the ground running in March and April, Jax says. Training and refresher courses include carrying water in a bin, so they can practice what it’s like with a live load sloshing in the back. “Otherwise you are setting a driver up to fail.”

Through ditches and up lanes

Getting grapes from vineyard to winery is akin to moving a three-quarter full bathtub down the road without spilling it, says seasoned Marlborough vintage driver Peter Welsh. “Put it this way, when you see a car stopping 5km ahead of you, you start slowing up.”

And he’s loved doing that since his first vintage at Forrest Estate in 2010. “You meet a whole lot of different people and get to a whole lot of places you’d never get to. Way up to Upton Downs in the Awatere Valley, and down the coast; into paddocks that you’d never get to, going through ditches and up lanes.”

“You meet a whole lot of different people and get to a whole lot of places.”

Peter Welsh

It’s “a combination of challenges”, adds Peter, who’s worked with Renwick Transport in recent years, taking time off his role as Renwick School caretaker to help out in short-staffed periods. The first year he did weekends and Easter, and the next year a four-week harvest period, with the school supportive of his moonlighting (quite literally right now, with a 3pm to 3am shift). “The school looks at it as helping the community at an important time of year.”

Despite his verve for vintage driving, comparing it to the hay harvest of his childhood, Peter doesn’t envy those dealing with the logistics of harvest transport. “Put it this way, they couldn’t pay me enough to do it.” But as long as he’s told where to go and when, and can manoeuvre his sloshing cargo through paddocks, ditches, lanes and roundabouts, he will be driving for every harvest he’s needed, “for as long as I am capable”.