South to a berry winery

Press, 13 June 1978, Page 13

South to a berry winery

Hfome & People

My first slop south in studying the New Zealand grape in all its aspects found me at Barker’s berrv winery in o_raldine. The first elderberries of the season had just been taken in; and as I followed Anthony Barker out to the winery 1 was told that everyone was busy and that he had little time for talking. But this big man likes to talk, and he warms quickly to his favourite topic — winemaking. And so while the berries were being crushed manually through a muslin cloth, the mus' pumped into ’inks, and errant equipment cursed and repaired, Anthony Barker told me about his wines. Nearly all of the berries he uses are collected wild by local people. The winery is in rolling country where blackberry hedgerows and the wild elder tree abound; and only the loganberries have to ne bought from a berry farm. The elder tree was brought to New Zealand by the early English settlers they used the flowers to make perfume, champagne, and fritters; the bark and roots to concoct

laxative; the leaves to brew a gargle, and also to make poultices and fly repellant; and the berries for wine.

“We are not out to thrash the grape-wine makers.” said Anthony

Barker. "But the grape does not have a mortgage on all the nice tastes — even if it likes to think it has.

"There are more people who cannot drink grape wine than the industry will admit. Grape wine gives them migraines, or indigestion or they come out in spots.” He claims that his fruit wines do not have these effects.

Anthony Barker’s ebullient wife, Gillian, is frequently in their new tasting room to greet visitors. This small, rotund woman is the embodiment of the jovial spirit of Chaucer’s times when elderberry wine and mead ru'ed in rural England.

She chuckles and twinkles and tells endless jokes as she doles out samples of her wines to anyone interested in tasting them — and, of course purchasing. It was with a smile that I drove from the Barkers’ Upton Cellars and pointed my Bacchuswaggon (as my camper had been christened by wine-loving friends) tow’ards Central Otago. The smile waned when I thought of a Central Otago devoid of vineyards.

For, as long ago as last century, wine experts — such as the, Italian Bragato — named Central Otago as ideal fo for the grape.

Rumours I had heard of the fruit wines of Otago cast them as horrible concoctions likely to dissolve your ’ drain pipes if you tipped them out. One wine I heard about was reputed to have been used by the local council to remove bitumen from the road. At Ettrick one is confronted with a large sign announcing “BAR” and carrying an arrow pointing to a farm gate. And it means what it says —for Peter Campbell was the first winemakers in New Zealand to obtain a vineyard bar permit.

The ironical thing is that he has not got a vine on the property which would qualify it as a vineyard. But this will not stop Peter Campbel] from selling you a 50c glass of his strawberry or blackcurrant wine.

Like every other professional fruit winemaker I have met Peter Campbell started as an amateur; but having a father who made hooch in the Hokonui

Hills during the prohibition years may have helped. The still continues to exist; it languishes in a shed on the Ettrick farm. Peter Campbell is a conscientious and ambitious winemaker who has toured Australia and the United States picking hte brains of wine experts. My next stop was at the small winery belonging to Mr J. L. Ferris, at Alexandra, whose winemaking activities are a retirement pastime.

“I don’t want to push my wine too much as I won’t want to be too busy,” he said. The Ferris wines are worth buying if only for their labels. These are a facsimile of the “Dunstan Times” front page which announced the discovery of gold in the Clutha River in the 1860 s; it makes fascinating reading. After tasting the wines of Centra! Otago my tongue is still intact. This must mean that these wines are not as fearsome as rumoured. They are, in fact, predominantly sweet and syrupy — which, the winemakers say, is what the public wants. Next stop: Nelson, via the West Coast.