CELEBRATE
Industry Pioneer The challenge and privilege of mastering Marlborough vines BRENDA WEBB
Photo by Kevin Judd
MARLBOROUGH VITICULTURIST Sioban Harnett enthuses about the young people entering the wine industry today. “I’m impressed and invigorated by them - there is great heart in the industry with the calibre of people coming through,” she says. Sioban did her first vintage back in 1993 with John Belsham, who was “marvellous” to work with - “really encouraging and very smart”. In the years since, she has worked for long periods at Villa Maria, Cloudy Bay and most recently Whitehaven, until after the 2020 harvest. Sioban loves Marlborough and the wine industry. “People come into the industry thinking it’s romantic and glamorous, and parts of it are. But most of it is sheer hard work requiring steady patience and the ability to tune into your environment and your vines,” she says. “For me it is still very deeply satisfying and enjoyable even after 30 years.” Kaikōura born and raised, Sioban did an agricultural science degree at Lincoln University in the late 1980s and then won a reciprocal scholarship
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to the US for the third year of her degree. She was unsure about which direction to head in, but one of her soil chemistry lecturers, Dr Rob Sherlock (a great wine enthusiast and formative contributor to the emerging postgraduate oenology/ viticulture course at Lincoln) offered sage mentoring. “He said the UC Davis faculty was highly regarded for oenology and viticulture and kind of pointed me in that direction,” she says. “I quickly and naturally gravitated toward the vineyards and my grades were good.” After doing a vintage at a sparkling wine facility in the Sonoma Valley, Sioban spent a year travelling around the States, working in a ski resort in Colorado and a summer on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. When she returned to New Zealand, it was back to Lincoln to do her Masters of Applied Science, after which she was approached by Villa Maria to take up a role as a vineyard cadet. Sioban did the 1994 vintage in Hawke’s Bay at Esk Valley, in both vineyards and cellar, and the following vintage in Gisborne before heading to
the Auckland cellar. “It’s wonderful to follow fruit right through from growing, harvesting, winemaking and finally blind assessment,” she says. “It’s such an opportunity to gather information and experience.” An opportunity soon came up in Marlborough. It was during challenging times, with phylloxera starting to take hold, and the young viticulturist turned her attention to both replanting with grafted vines and dealing with rapid vineyard expansion in new subregions. Part of her responsibility was managing Villa Maria’s “quite new” Seddon vineyards. “It was initially 40 hectares and was then a ‘big block’ in a rather untried location,” she says. “There was no cell phone coverage. It was all quite new and experimental at the time. I was working with Steve Smith and looking back, man, we fasttracked a lot of good work together.” Sioban spent seven years at Villa during which time the company expanded from having fruit processed at the Vintech site on Rapaura Rd, to opening its own large modern plant at Fairhall. She left Villa to do an MBA
