Editorial - Sophie Preece

From the Editor

SO LONG 2021, and here’s looking at you 2022. This edition looks back at the year we’ve just endured, with its light vintage, logistical challenges, lockdown, and labour stresses. It also looks at the year ahead, with two of these four challenges still firmly in place, along with some new ones to boot.

That’s why the Marlborough Winegrowers Association board decided that the Marlborough Wine & Food Festival would not be held in February this year, with Covid-19 posing too many risks to the community and wine industry on the cusp of the harvest, “especially given the shortage of staff and scarcity of experience in wineries, due to border restrictions”, says board chair Beth Forrest on page 6.

The year ahead is also rich with opportunities, of course, including the just-launched Sauvignon Blanc Grapevine Improvement Programme, which will use tough love on plant cells to create up to 20,000 entirely new variants of

contemporary New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, before selecting those that best serve the industry. “Growing a huge number of vines – each very subtly different – will allow us to select traits to accommodate a changing environment, capture market opportunities, and fend off biosecurity threats,” says Bragato Research Institute chief executive Jeffrey Clarke on page 8.

This month’s cover story is the native plantings at Mount Riley’s Seventeen Valley vineyard, in the first of the year’s Forgotten Corners series, looking at growing biodiversity in and around Marlborough vineyards. If you have a planted stream, slope or headland, or know of biodiversity projects happening in the region, I’d love to hear about them.

In the meantime, here’s wishing you a fruitful 2022.

SOPHIE PREECE