GRAPE expectations
They say that behind every good wine is a great woman. Actually, I made that up – they don’t say it, but they should. Especially in Aotearoa, where a 2019 survey by New Zealand Winegrowers indicated that around 48% of industry respondents were female. Although figures aren’t broken down by region, given that the north-eastern tip of the South Island is our largest wine region, more than a few women make Marlborough’s wine industry tick. We tracked down five of them.
JANE HUNTER
Owner, Hunter’s Wines
Jane Hunter may be many things, but a quitter isn’t one of them. When her husband Ernie died in a car accident in 1987, Jane could easily have closed the Renwick winery he’d set up a few years earlier.
“I didn’t know anything about running a winery,” admits Jane, 67. “We’d been having a hard time before Ernie died, trying to keep the business going with 28% interest rates. I also had to get on a plane three months after his death to visit our overseas markets, which was incredibly tough because I’m not gregarious like Ernie was. But I couldn’t walk away from it.”
Fortunately she didn’t, because today Hunter’s Wines is one of Aotearoa’s most successful wineries, with 25
