Misha's Vineyard

An update from Misha

The pace of the past two months is just starting to slow – and it’s now the day before Christmas! During these two months Andy and I have hit some major milestones with the vineyard. Our 2009 Release events this year marked the start of producing commercial quantities of wine – at last! Last year when we launched our first wines we had “The Audition” Pinot Noir 2007 – of which only 100 cases were made primarily as a ‘trial’ along with tiny quantities of 3 aromatic varieties. It was great to get those first wines out for review by the trade and media but we needed to wait until this year before we could seriously look at distribution.

After a lot of hard work, we announced 4 distributors in November this year. In Asia we announced Jebsen Fine Wines in Hong Kong, Apurevu Trading in Japan and Rubicon Reserve Wines in Singapore. And for the New Zealand domestic market, we were very pleased to announce Negociants New Zealand. This announcement was made at our Auckland media lunch on the 18th November (an auspicious date as it ends in 8!). It was a great feeling knowing we had 4 distributors in place given the tough economic climate and the plethora of brands seeking distribution across the globe. I think we’ve been able to achieve this because we have held true to our philosophy of ‘no compromises’ from the very outset of what we call “vineyard project”. Over the past eight years, we have ensured that we don’t take shortcuts in the vineyard, in the winery, with our team and now, with the appointment of our partners who will take our wines to the market.

This year for our ’09 Releases, our Auckland event had a table of 20 media for lunch at one of Auckland’s very best restaurants, The Grove . The restaurant is run by Michael & Annette Dearth and it was the second year we had worked with Michael in trying to come up with a spectacular lunch menu that would work perfectly with our wines. We were very lucky to be working with Chef Ben Bayly who created an amazing selection of dishes that certainly impressed all. We have a great partnership with The Grove and look forward to holding our 2010 Release events there next November.

In Wellington, our ’09 Release lunch was held in the private room at the Boulcott St Bistro. Again we enjoyed fantastic food and the mood in the room was just perfect and made for a thoroughly enjoyable lunch. So far the media reviews from these events have been amazing.

As a relatively young vineyard, we know there’s a long way to go, but we know we’re doing things right. We have recruited a fantastic team over the latter half of this year as moved from contract vineyard crews to our own team and now have Rich leading that team, and the lovely Cassy running our admin and operations. Over the coming year there are more milestones to hit as we increase our distribution to another 4 markets but our focus will certainly be on supporting the markets in which we’ve announced new partnerships so that together we can build the Misha’s Vineyard brand.

We look forward to working hard again in 2010.

Misha

Tags: Apurevu, Cassy Farmer, central otago, Misha, misha's, mishas vineyard, Negociants, Rich Williams, Rubicon Reserve, Wine Distributor

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Andy and I were in Tokyo for a few days in mid October with our new distributor there – Apurevu Trading. It’s a great city and the more time I spend there, the more I like it. We decided long ago that it was going to be an important market for Misha’s Vineyard – back at a time when Japan was in fact the biggest and most important market in Asia for New Zealand wine (albeit still small volumes in the scheme of things), however that situation has changed quite dramatically.

Surprisingly, even though Japan has a population of 128 million, New Zealand exports twice the amount of wine to Singapore (with its tiny 5 million population), than it does to Japan! Just three years ago New Zealand exported similar volumes of wine to both Singapore and Japan although in value terms the Japanese exports were worth 30% more.

Although exports of New Zealand wine to Japan decreased a little in the last year, the two years prior saw double digit growth. But Japan is a market you need to make a long-term commitment to, and that’s what we decided, so we’re there for the long haul!

On this last trip we did a ‘preview’ of our wines at a trade tasting event with our new distributor at Oregon Bar and Grill at the Shiodome – just outside the Ginza area. The venue was on the 42nd floor and provided a spectacular view over Tokyo. During the afternoon a trade tasting was held followed by a customer tasting in the evening.

The feedback on our wines was amazing – the Japanese loved the fresh, crisp, pure styles of the aromatic whites and loved the finesse and structure of the Pinot Noir! We showed our 2008 Gewurztraminer and 2008 Riesling, and three of our new releases — 2009 Sauvignon Blanc, 2009 Pinot Gris and the 2008 Pinot Noir. At the end of the customer evening, we had people begging us to sell them the left-over wines! Our new distributor was delighted with the feedback and can’t wait to get their first order of our wines there!

It was great catching up with people there too – we had lunch with Carl Robinson from Jeroboam, Ned Goodwin (an Aussie working for Global Dining and hopefully soon will be the first and only MW in Japan), and our good friend Miyuki Ishibashi who was part of our Misha’s Vineyard brand panel and really helped ensure we had the right packaging (and translation) for Japan when we were creating our brand.
We also saw a lot of the sommeliers and retailers that we met back in June at the New Zealand wine fair so it was great to be there again not so long after our last visit – it all help in building those important relationships.

Keep a look out for more updates…

(Misha)

(I’ve just written an article called “Japan – Too Big, Too Hard, or Too Good to Miss” which discusses the Japanese market in detail for Australian Wine Business Monthly which will appear in November ‘09 issue).

Tags: Apurevu, Misha, misha's, misha's tokyo, mishas vineyard, tokyo pinot, Tokyo wine

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