6 minute read
Jules Taylor
New Zealand Winemaker of the Year
SOPHIE PREECE
“I am super chuffed “WE’VE COME a very long way from standing around the builders’ block at the and super proud. I love Spring Creek Playcentre,” says Jules Taylor, Gourmet Marlborough and everything Traveller Wine’s 2021 New Zealand Winemaker of the Year. The “we” is the founder of Jules Taylor that goes on here.” Wines and her one-time carpentry companion Ben Glover, winner of the Gourmet Traveller Wine Jules Taylor Leadership Award, some 45 years after they hung out at Playcentre. The award is a delight, but she’s embarrassed to have
Come a long way indeed. “Jules is one of New Zealand’s beaten the other nominees, who are “so great and so modern pioneers,” said the judges in the awards. “She innovative and cool, and doing really interesting things in produces outstanding wine, is fiercely proud of her region, this space”. And she repeatedly points out that the success and mentors the up-and-coming breed of Kiwi winemakers.” of Jules Taylor Wines doesn’t come down to Jules Taylor That’s a “really nice recognition of all the bloody hard work alone. “It’s a big old team effort. There have been a lot of that’s gone into this”, says Jules. “I am super chuffed and people along the way, helping out with all sorts of stuff.” super proud, I love Marlborough and everything that goes Without good growers and the viticulture team and “the on here, so that’s kind of cool too.” winemaking guys that babysit those bunches when they
Back in those Playcentre days in the 1970s, grapes come in” she wouldn’t have great wines, she says. were beginning to flourish in Marlborough. And by 1990, Jules has long been a proud champion of Marlborough when Jules left for a Bachelor of Science at Canterbury Sauvignon Blanc and is making the same style as she was University, studying zoology and plant microbial science, 10 years ago, “cause it’s not broke”, she says. “I mean sure, vines were transforming the region. With her science degree we are exploring other styles of the variety to make it more and unabated curiosity in hand, she went on to Lincoln accessible for a wider audience – those people who hate University, to study viticulture and winemaking. the classic in-your-face style. They might enjoy that more
Jules initially planned to become a viticulturist, but was textural and slightly more complex barrel ferment.” soon hooked by the metamorphosis of grapes to wine, along But plenty has changed over the past decade, with with the “craziness” of her first vintage in 1994. When she’d the couple buying their own vineyard and leasing finished her studies, she worked hard to get a footing in another, while building partnerships with distributors and Marlborough’s industry, becoming one of New Zealand’s few customers around the world. Relationships, says Jules, are women winemakers, then setting off for vintages in Italy, key in whatever you’re doing, in any industry. And her spending nine years alternating vintages in Marlborough commitment to the people, industry and region she works and Italy, including five harvests in Sicily. with have earned her a reputation for more than great
Jules and her husband George Elworthy launched their wine, said the Gourmet Traveller Wine judges. “The respect own label in 2001, with 400 cases of Jules Taylor Wines, and and mana that Jules has in the New Zealand community have spent the past 20 years growing the brand. It’s taken a is as much a reflection of the wines she makes as it is the lot of gumption, she admits. “It’s about believing in yourself contributions she is making to the country’s industry.” and taking a punt. No one got anywhere without risking The award comes at the end of a “complicated” Covid something.” That comes with plenty of sleepless nights. “We year, and on the cusp of a “really low harvest,” Jules says. started with nothing – or less than nothing - so it’s been a “It’s going to be really interesting what happens. We just long road. But I don’t think I would change anything.” have to work together with people. We will know at the end
of harvest how much we have got, then it’s about allocating that out in a fair and equitable way, looking after the people who looked after us. That’s important.”
Meanwhile, the fruit is clean in loose bunches, and ripening rapidly, due to small crops. “It’s going to come in fast and be over with a hiss and a roar.” They’re the kind of seasonal vagaries that may bring sleepless nights, but also provide the “beauty” of the industry, Jules says. “It’s not the same every single year or month or whatever…it makes it interesting.”
Crafting Community
WHEN BEN Glover established The Coterie with Rhyan Wardman in 2018, he envisaged “kitchen table collaborations” amid an ethos of collegiality. Building community is a harder task than ever, given Marlborough’s ever-expanding wine industry, but the crew at The Coterie – a contract winemaking facility devoted to smallbatch organic wines – work hard to protect and nurture connections, he says.
It’s the kind of outward looking perspective that has seen Ben awarded the Leadership Award at the Gourmet Wine Traveller New Zealand Winemaker Awards 2021. “Winemaker, wine judge and businessman: there’s nothing Ben doesn’t know about the New Zealand wine industry,” says the awards blurb. “His sense of humour, storytelling and passion for making fine wine are surpassed only by the love he has for his family.”
Ben, who is the winemaker behind Glover Family Vineyards and Zephyr Wines, started out as assistant to Brent Marris at Wither Hills in 1998. In the 22 years since, he has forged a reputation as a winemaker, wine judge and industry stalwart, who’ll typically put up his hand to help events and people within and outside of the wine industry.
Ben says wine judging – including as chief judge for this year’s Marlborough Wine Show, as Cuisine Magazine’s lead judge and as co-chair of the New Zealand Wine of The Year Awards – has been an important part of giving back to the industry, growing collegial activity and nurturing the talents of “passionate enthusiastic young wine people”.
He was also chair of Pinot Noir 2017, but says establishing The Coterie was probably his most “concrete step” into helping the wine community. Looking away from his own wines and work to support others was much easier when he was employed by a major company that could “afford you the time”, rather than running his own business (or three), he adds. “I am working a hell of a lot harder and smarter than I was five or six years ago, but it’s great seeing such talent and enthusiasm involved in the Marlborough region and New Zealand wine as a whole”.
Marlborough’s wine industry has provided a “great bunch of people” to work with, he adds. “They are solutions orientated – always say ‘yes’ first and then think about how they can achieve their goal.”
