Cloudy Bay winemaker on the secret to keeping top New Zealand tipple consistently good, and the challenges of climate change
Good soil, good management and a focus on quality at every step lie behind the New Zealand sauvignon blanc’s success, says Jim White, who tells us why he’s forever chasing ‘the eyebrow moment’
What drew you to the wine business? “Originally, I wanted to be in advertising. My dad was an advertising manager and in high school I did some work at a firm and found it creative, energetic and dynamic. Later, I interned with an agency in Melbourne.
“My girlfriend at the time had moved to Queensland, so my friends and I drove up on a month-long trip to see her. Along the way, I realised I didn’t want to live in the city but in the country, so I went back to Melbourne and started studying agriculture, to learn to be a farmer.”
What was the attraction of wine? “With wine, no one sees the grapes. Consumers get a glass of wine, and love the aromas and flavours – it’s nothing about what it looks like. I was a pretty scruffy guy. I had dreadlocks and a big beard. That ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ really sat well with me then, and it sits well with me now.”
The winemaker’s responsibility is to keep replicating that first-time experience, which we call ‘the eyebrow moment’: when [a drinker] smells it and their eyebrows go up and they say, ‘What is this?’
What was the bottle that clinched it? “It was 23 years ago, during my second year at university. The guys a year above me had done some industry placement and brought back a bottle of wine from a region about an hour and a half from the university. I wasn’t a wine drinker then, but when I tasted it … I literally remember the place, the time, the wine, the people around me, the whole thing. This light bulb went on in my head, and that was it.