The Wine Industry

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30763, 29 May 1965, Page 4

The Wine Industry

Winemakers of New Zealand. By Dick Scott. Southern Cross Books, Auckland. 98 pp.

The w-ine industry in New Zealand has found in Mr Scott a careful and competent historian. Its earliest pioneer was James Busby, who, in May 1833. arrived at the Bay of Islands to take up his appointment as British Resident. The French settlers at Akaroa—as Mr Seott records—celebrated feast days of saints, after whom their children were named, with the drinking of wine from their own cellars. He goes on to tell of the impetus the industry received from French priests and lay brothers of the French Marist Order sent to New Zealand “in the five years from 1838 onwards.”

In telling the story of Joseph Soler's wine making

iin Wanganui, of Heinrich | Breidecker’s vineyards at IKohukohu and of William Beetham’s at Masterton, Mr i Scott reaches some of the ■ high points of the industry’s development during the nineteenth century. He tells, for example how a reporter called al Beetham’s vineyard at vintage time and found a team of children working for 2s a day, who had just picked 13 tons of grapes from which Beetham’s labourers had trodden 1850 gallons of wine. The industry suffered setbacks. Phylloxera, first suspected in 1885, was positively identified by Romeo Bragato ten years later. Bragato became head of the Viticultural Division of the Department of Agriculture in 1902. His tireless efforts to stimulate interest in the industry's development, and the frustration he encountered through lack of adequate Government support, as well as through the prohibition campaign, are sympathetically noted by the author who traces the industry’s chequered history down to recent times. “Sales of wine”—he writes—” reached over the million gallon mark for the first time, in 1962-63, an increase of 140,000 gallons in one year. Part II of this book surveys very briefly, but with a wealth of illustration, the development of a dozen, prosperous New Zealand vineyards, half of them being situated in Henderson.