Lifetime Achievement

James Healy’s mark on Marlborough wine

SOPHIE PREECE

“THE MARLBOROUGH wine industry has been extremely kind to me,” says James Healy, 32 years after he pulled up in an iridescent green Holden Premier packed with his family and belongings.

James had cut his oenological teeth with Corbans in Auckland and Gisborne, but found his people and place at Cloudy Bay when he started there in 1991. Experimentation was embraced, the work was “vital and free”, and his colleagues – including viticulturist Ivan Sutherland and winemaker Kevin Judd – were kindred spirits in crafting wines. “It was just a perfect bunch of people together,” says James, who was awarded a Wine Marlborough Lifetime Achievement Award in November, for his extraordinary contribution to the region’s wine industry. “If you had an idea, you just tried it out on a few barrels. You just did it. Which fits completely with how I feel. As soon as you start getting to, ‘we’ve always done it like that’, I feel like shooting myself.”

Unconfined by convention, they were audacious with oak, adventurous with wild ferments, and watched ugly ducklings transform to swans, given sufficient time. “The three of us would taste the wine and then extend the idea. Not everything might work, but a lot of them worked extremely well,” James says, noting outcomes like the iconic barrel-fermented Cloudy Bay Te Koko Sauvignon Blanc.

Ivan and James took that hands-on, hearts-in, habitsout philosophy when they and their wives – Margaret and Wendy respectively – launched Dog Point Vineyards in 2004, with a Sauvignon Blanc and three barrel fermented wines – Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and the Section 94 Sauvignon Blanc – all made with natural yeasts. When the time came to share those wines, the Holden Premier took to the road again, with Ivan and James touring the length and breadth of the country, wide white boxes of wine strapped to the slim roofline of the striking car, its doors now adorned with the tī kōuka (cabbage tree) of Dog Point Vineyards.

It’s a work life he’s loved, but not the one James anticipated when he went to Otago University to study biochemistry, considering wine to be cheap alcohol. As he progressed in his degree, James was influenced by a genetics professor who was passionate about wine. “Once you got to about third year in the biochemistry department he looked around and spotted people he thought might have an interest in wine,” says James, who was invited to tastings of special wines – mostly from France, occasionally from Germany – that transformed his view and shifted his plans.

On completing his postgraduate studies, James and Wendy moved to Auckland, where he set about getting a job. “I wrote letters to every single winery I could find in the yellow pages… I got a letter back from Joe Babich, and one from Peter Hubscher, and one from George Fistonich. And then I got offered a job at Corbans.” He started in the cellar and after a couple of years moved up to quality control manager.

James was exposed to Marlborough fruit from 1983, when Corbans began to truck their grapes to the Gisborne winery, and found flavours of the subsequent wines astounding. “I couldn’t believe that a grape could make such a massive difference. In 1990 James “struck at the right time” when he asked Kevin, Cloudy Bay’s founding winemaker, if there were any jobs to be had and received an offer to join. “We just packed everything up and moved down.”

More than three decades on, James has made an indelible mark on the region, through extraordinary wines, knowledge-sharing events, and the mentoring of winemakers. In 2018 he became a founding member of Appellation Marlborough Wine (AMW), which offers a

safeguard of the provenance and production values of accredited wines. It also casts a halo over the region as a whole, giving Marlborough more credibility, he says. “If you look around the world at any places making wine successfully for a long time, they have all introduced some sort of a system that when the bottle has a logo on it, it’s a guarantee of what’s in it.” Wine is about people, he adds. “No people, no wine. And the human desire is to always do something; to take it and explore it and do it better. This whole AMW is just one step in that process.”

Looking back at his wine career, James notes there are no single stand out moments, but a swathe of them.

“A highlight was getting into the wine industry in the first place. A highlight was falling in love with wine in the first place. A highlight was being able to move and work at an iconic winery in Marlborough. A highlight was starting Dog Point and having the whole damned thing work. There’s no one thing.”

Another highlight is the work James and Wendy do now, helping their daughter Sophie and her husband Mark McGill, the founders of Cider and Chardonnay producer Abel, with a winery, cidery, and 5-hectare Chardonnay vineyard on 30 hectares of beautiful country in Tasman’s Upper Moutere. For James, who’s long loved making Chardonnay, the opportunity to delve into the unique fruit of the Moutere Clays, proven by the likes of the Finns at nearby Neudorf, is an excellent next step in the road trip. “There’s something about the fruit intensity,” he says. A few years ago James and Wendy moved to Nelson to help in that endeavour. The Holden, however, remains at Dog Point.

Photo Richard Briggs

Trucking on for 43 years

Murray Gibbons was bemused when people started messaging him with congratulatory messages on November 17. “Then my wife found the article, and I thought ‘oh my goodness me’.”

The owner of Bulk Wine Distribution didn’t attend the Marlborough Wine Show Celebration where his Wine Marlborough Lifetime Achievement Award was announced, thinking his invite was simply a polite gesture.

When the penny dropped, he decided to consider it an accolade for all the truckies of Marlborough’s wine industry. “We often say, ‘I wonder if anyone notices we start the process and we finish the process,” he says. “There’s an awfully large number of people out there that do the same as me.”

His trucking journey began in 1980, when he took a six-week temporary job with Irvines Freightlines. One of the biggest changes since has been the trucks themselves, he says. “It wasn’t how many there were but how old they were and how slow they were and how rough as guts they were. And how you felt at the end of a day.”

In 2004 Murray started trucking grapes and wines, and has built wonderful relationships in the industry ever since. Everyone in the valley knows and values him, says Saint Clair Family Estate winemaker Stewart Maclennan, adding that Murray will be missed when he sells his business, which is currently on the market. Until then Murray will keep on trucking, likely heading as far as he can from all the attention the Lifetime Achievement Award has cast on him. Head to TradeMe to see the listing for Bulk Wine Distribution. To read more about Murray, check out the October 2023 Winepress.