IF YOU'RE a regular reader, you won't be surprised to hear who won Winestate's New Zealand Wine Company of the Year award for 2008. Saint Clair mounted a strong challenge, but the winner is the same winery that won last year, the year before ... and the year before that. In fact, 10 times in the past 11 years, this major award has gone to Villa Maria.
For New Zealand's largest, wholly family-owned winery, the accolade has great promotional value. "Winning essentially reflects a job well done," says Alistair Maling, group winemaker for Villa Maria, "and shows you're heading in the right direction." Major competitive tastings are "a process that independently measures your wines, by one's industry peers, against similar wines. They are one method of promoting and highlighting your wines against other brands and are useful to our sales and export teams."
Alistair, who grew up in Hawke's Bay, earned a postgraduate diploma in oenology and viticulture from Lincoln University in Canterbury, and later spent several years overseeing winemaking projects in Europe, California, South America and South Africa. Two years after passing the Master of Wine exam in 2000, he succeeded Michelle Richardson at the top of Villa Maria's production hierarchy.
The Villa Maria empire includes three wine companies - Villa Maria itself, based in Auckland, and Esk Valley and Vidal, in Hawke's Bay - but the Winestate award is exclusively for the wines marketed under the Villa Maria brand.
The driving force behind the company is George Fistonich (dubbed 'Fisto' by his fellow Croatian winemakers). Since the early 1960s, George has steadily built Villa Maria from a tiny, south Auckland producer of fortified and modest table wines into New Zealand's fourth largest wine company, with an extensive collection of wines offering a magical combination of quality and value. Villa Maria's current annual output ranges from 650,000 to 750,000 cases, and since 2004 all its wines have been sealed with screw-caps.
Pivotal to Villa Maria's glowing success over the past decade has been its access to large volumes of top-quality fruit. Contract grapegrowers supply about 80 per cent of its total intake, but the top wines are usually grown in vineyards either owned or managed by the company. In Hawke's Bay, Villa Maria owns four vineyards - Ngakirikiri, Joseph Soler, Omahu Gravels and Vidal - in the Gimblett Gravels, totalling over 170ha of classic red Bordeaux varieties, syrah and chardonnay.
As a key alternative source of grapes, Villa Maria has pioneered in New Zealand the development of specialist, publicly owned vineyard companies, to secure fine quality grapes from Marlborough - sauvignon blanc, chardonnay, pinot gris, semillon, riesling and pinot noir - and Hawke's Bay.
In 2005, after decades headquartered in a utilitarian, pseudo-Spanish winery at Mangere, in south Auckland, Villa Maria opened a beautiful, $NZ30 million Auckland Winery and Vineyard Park in Waitomokia, a shallow volcanic cone on the Ihumatao Peninsula, near Auckland International Airport. Built from volcanic stone, concrete aggregate, cedar and steel, the new winery does all the bottling and distribution for the company's wineries further south (including the long-established Esk Valley and Vidal wineries in Hawke's Bay, and the modern winery in Marlborough), and is flanked by 20ha of gewurztraminer (principally), chardonnay, pinot noir (for sparkling) and verdelho vines.
The top-tier wines are labelled Villa Maria Reserve or Single Vineyard. While the Reserve wines, blended from various top-performing vineyards, celebrate regional styles, the Single Vineyard range narrows the focus to specific sites - Villa Maria describes them as terroir wines. The more widely available Cellar Selection range also offers very good to outstanding quality - and often stunning value. The fourth-tier Private Bin wines - despite the term 'private bin', they are produced in large volumes - are consistently attractive and priced sharply.
Villa Maria's vast output also includes rare, experimental wines in its 'R & D' (Research and Development) series; low-priced wines under the Riverstone, Ruben Hall and St Aubyns brands; the Thornbury range of good, mid-priced varietal wines; and attractive, often distinctly classy Northrow wines, aimed at the restaurant trade.
Now in his late 60s, George Fistonich has no children involved in the company on a full-time basis, but his daughter, Karen, a former banker who is married to Milan Brajkovich, of Kumeu River, chairs the board of directors.
Will George ever sell Villa Maria? "If I was going to make a hell of a lot of money out of the winery, I would have sold it during the scramble for Corbans and Montana, when everybody was trying to buy a big stake in New Zealand," he said in 2004. "Money has never been my objective. I have only ever been interested in making wine … I couldn't give a stuff about what the business is worth; that's never going to change my lifestyle."