Quantity and Quality – Both?

January 25th, 2010 | Posted by Hennie

I had a long conversation with a friend of mine in South Africa about a presentation she attended on the South Africa wine industry. A variety of presentations on a variety of subjects. You can have a look at all the presentations here. It makes for some very interesting reading in general. Trust me however to be grabbed by the following statement about wine grape producers: “The common denominator for success seems to be high yields or high prices, but preferably both”.

Quite a logical conclusion/statement.

But read against the graph that shows yields (tonne per hectare), I nearly fell off my chair. Top performers since 2006? Wait for it – 20 to 22 Tonne per hectare!

If you are a NZ grape grower, you can get off the floor and back into your chair now. The comparative graph does show that the industry average is between 15 and 16 tonne per hectare (ok, you can get back off the floor and back into your chair again now).

The most interesting thing for me is that I know how good the SA wines generally are. I know it is cool climate versus warm climate. But can you imagine what it would be like to have anything near those yield levels whilst retaining quality levels? Must be wine heaven.

I haven’t heard of anything in NZ that could match those yields (well maybe I have but we won’t go there now). It just strengthened my belief that in our case here in NZ (and our case at Sandihurst ), the focus cannot be shifted from premium quality. We can never compete on quantity. We can on quality. At 5-6 tonne to the hectare (Pinot) and 8-10 tonne (Riesling), we have to…