It’s long been said that your dinner depends on the quality of what you put into it – and never has this been more true than now, with the wide availability of any kind of vegetable at any time of the year, products from overseas and meat grown in near-industrial conditions. The difference between now and a century ago, as we’re increasingly aware, is that these days the quality and care with which something has been grown or produced doesn’t just affect your dinner or your wallet, it affects the planet in a myriad of ways.
In New Zealand, we can’t afford to stop producing food for the planet – it’s the very basis of our economy – but we also can’t afford to do so in a wasteful or careless way. So, when Lincoln University and Taste hosted a dinner at Christchurch’s Shop Eight, they selected a range of suppliers and producers to help them – producers who care very deeply about what they do and the effect that they have on the environment.
Labels can be misleading, and the dinner challenged many ideas we take for granted. It’s about more than whether a product is organic or biodynamic or local, though these help, of course. Most of the producers came from the food bowl that is Canterbury (the fish came from Leigh, north of Auckland) and not all of them were small growers, either.
What really counts is the total sum of production, the energy and effort with which things have been produced and the care that has been taken. For these producers, selling food and wine is not just a business or a way of making money: it’s their very way of life – and it shows.
Black Estate
You’ll find Black Estate perched in a long, narrow black building at the top of their home vineyard in Waipara Valley, north Canterbury, with a limestone outcrop behind them and the valley spread out below. It is a spectacular site with a beautiful view. The building is both long and black, both open and closed to the elements. Here, winemaker Nicholas Brown and his wife, Pen Naish, live and work across three special vineyards and a restaurant that sources almost everything from the surrounding area. “Our wine is really true,” Naish says. “We farm organically and we make wine that’s quite simple, and a true expression of the site – so we wanted this building to be a very true expression of this place.”
Waipara might feel like you’re tucked away in the mountains, but the coast is just beyond the slowly eroding Teviot Hills. There’s a distinctly maritime influence, with all the variability and change that brings. They’ve been there eight harvests, and no two harvests have been the same, but this doesn’t bother them. “With our wines we’re not trying to make the same wine each year,” Brown says. “We’re trying to make wine with a backbone that is Black Estate.”
The vineyard was started in the 1980s by well-known Christchurch restaurateur Russell Black and was bought by the Naish family almost a decade ago. Naish’s father Rod is a green thumb from way back who had a plant nursery in Canterbury, which he sold, ironically, because none of his children wanted to work on the land. After two or three years of searching, thinking they would start from scratch, Black Estate came on the market. “I saw real potential here,” Brown says. “It’s got a really good climate and great soils for wine. It had a place to plant a new vineyard as well as an existing vineyard, which was perfect.”
“We’re trying to make wine with a backbone”.
The three vineyards are distinctly different. The home vineyard is clay, with limestone influences from the eroding hills, and then denser, stony parts underneath. In summer, the ground cracks and dries out, and the roots have to push down into the stonier soil to find water. The clay gives the wine texture, and the stone gives it minerality. Here, they’ve planted another four hectares of chardonnay and pinot noir, as well as cabernet franc.
Up the road a little bit is Damsteep – named accordingly because it’s very steep. Here, they grow riesling on an undulating slope, which has a density of soil that is dark and friable, and eroding. “So you get a beautiful silken fruit and then a fine, natural structure.”
At Netherwood, meanwhile, there is five hectares of chardonnay and pinot noir in a vineyard that was planted in the 1980s and where the vine age gives a completely different profile to the wine.
The vineyards are tended by hand and individually handpicked. The yield of each vineyard is processed separately in wax-lined wooden barrels rather than stainless-steel tanks, in a building at the top of the Netherwood vineyard that has no heating or cooling. At Black Estate they rely on the weather to do all that for them. The result is subtle, textural wine that goes beautifully with food – there’s a slipperiness to the wines, an earthy subtlety rather than blockbuster flavours. It’s a return to older, quieter ways of making wine. “We’re not trying to force anything here,” Brown says. “Not because we don’t want to move with the times, but because (these methods) work – and they clearly express the area.”
Greystone
When the Thomas family set out to establish a vineyard, they looked far and wide for a site that would replicate the wines of their beloved Burgundy. They searched California, Australia and then New Zealand until, in 2000, they finally settled on a former sheep station on steep country in Waipara, north Canterbury.
You can see why. Waipara feels enclosed, almost mountainous, yet the sea is so close; drive a couple of kilometres down a side road and you hit the coast, a series of slate-grey beaches with steep hills behind.
The soils here are known as “noble soils” – clay over limestone, and the summers are hot, dry and windy, plus the influence of the Pacific Ocean, just over the Teviot Hills, which loom above the vineyard. “Pinot noir is quite a fickle grape and it does respond to being on the edge a bit,” winemaker Dom Maxwell says, who started as a cellar hand when the vineyard was established, 14 years ago. “We’ve got these incredible soils, clay and limestone, sandstone and greensand, and they contribute a unique flavour to the wine.”
Here at Greystone – and at the neighbouring vineyard Muddy Water, which the family purchased a few years ago – they grow riesling and chardonnay and pinot noir. They run the place on a biodynamic basis, which precludes the use of chemical fertilisers or sprays. It’s an approach that has evolved as the vineyard has matured. “We like to consume organic produce and local produce, and we grow our own stuff at home. So we’ve brought that into the vineyard because it’s true to who we are. We firmly believe you get a better sense of place when you’re not spraying chemicals onto it.”
The proof is in the vineyard. Following a more natural approach gives better fruit with savoury, earthy qualities that speak of the soil. Put simply, the fruit tastes fantastic, and so does the wine. It has what Maxwell describes as a “poised acidity” that comes from cooler springs and autumns, and a touch of Oriental spice.
They’re more relaxed in the winery, too. The wines are naturally fermented and left to mature for as long as necessary, rather than forcing the wine – even if that means they run out of something. The turning point for Maxwell was working a vintage in Burgundy. “It opened my eyes to how you can make great wine by picking fruit and letting it ferment – very basic winemaking,” he says. “They were less worried about the numbers.”
As a result, there are subtle changes from year to year, though the wine still has the same underlying “voice”. It’s just that the voice changes each year and their customers have come to expect that. 2014, for instance, was relatively big and intense, while 2015 was more floral and delicate, and these two wines tell a story about the vineyard and the season and the weather.
Fifteen years on, the land is starting to look different, too. As well as vineyards, the family has planted thousands of native trees and manages its water use carefully.
“We’ve got these incredible soils, clay, limestone, sandstone and greensand.”
He was creating quite a radical business.
“It’s nice to be able to say the two properties we’ve got look better now than they did when they were farms.”
Garden City 2.0
Bailey Peryman launched Garden City 2.0 in May 2013, after a year of intensive research into food production in Canterbury. He had always loved messing about with food and community gardening, first as a student and then as a graduate, but what he really needed was something that would also provide him with an income. “I found resistance, or no real capacity within the community sector to take on the sorts of things I wanted to explore,” he says. “I don’t think there’s enough importance placed on the value of community economic development. It integrates with those social and environmental values – you should be embedding all of them into what you do.”
At its simplest, Peryman was sourcing food from local growers and delivering it in bags to people around Christchurch. In doing so, he was creating quite a radical business, one which cut out the middlemen – the wholesalers, the distributors, the entire business of food – resulting in food that was fresher than you’d find in the supermarket, and which was cheaper for consumers, but paid
the grower more.
He learned a lot along the way: early advice from Oooby (Out of Our Own Back Yards) was that he should target market gardeners around Christchurch. Never mind visions of supplying people with food grown by small growers: he had to supply them consistently or lose business, and the best way to do that was with market gardeners.
He found organic growers – like Rainor Ramharter who was looking to diversify his crops away from a couple of varieties – who were finding their businesses increasingly unviable in the face of increasing pressure from wholesalers and supermarkets.
Along the way, Peryman’s ideas around what was local and sustainable changed ever so subtly. “We started from such a pure, idealistic standpoint and we’ve actually been able to maintain most of that.” A year and a bit in, however, a bad autumn led to a bad spring, and there was less produce available, which meant a choice between not supplying customers or sourcing produce from further around the South Island. “It was a really interesting process of thinking through what’s local and what’s appropriate.”
It was when they opened a pop-up greengrocers that Garden City 2.0 really took off. They wanted to introduce a social element to the business – dropping food bags was all very well, but it didn’t start conversations. “It just blew all expectations out of the water about how ready and supportive people were,” he says. “It was a great experiment but because I don’t have a business background it really was biting off more than we could chew.”
Now, he’s passing on the food bag business to Oooby, and focussing back on community agriculture, developing market gardens on abandoned land around central Christchurch as part of
a project called Cultivate. In doing so, they’ll be teaching people, particularly urban youth, about food production, and how to make it more sustainable.
There is no better place to grow food, after all, than close to the people who eat it. “It’s pretty clear that the next generation are going to come from urban backgrounds with very little agricultural experience,” Peryman says. “But there are so many people who feel the most meaningful work they can do is restoring land, producing food and growing communities. And that’s what we’re about.”
“We shouldn’t routinely be putting antibiotics into our food, it’s sort of a no-brainer, really,”
Westwood Chickens
Pete and Joy McLeod had owned their land at West Melton on the Canterbury Plains for several years when, in 1998, they finally settled on farming chickens. They had tried their hand at asparagus and cherries and nashi pears. Pete was a teacher and Joy had trained as a landscape architect, before becoming an inspector for the BioGro organic certification programme. As she travelled around the country, she realised there was no proper organic, free-range chicken available, “It’s environmental for me,” she says. “But it was also producing healthy food for people. And it involved animal welfare – that was another thing we were pretty strong on.”
Free-range chicken is something of a vexed subject. There’s no strict definition of what it means. The birds can have access to the outdoors, but may not necessarily take advantage of it, and some chicken farmers have as many as 10 birds per square metre.
The thing about chickens at Westwood, is that they are entirely free range. They start their lives in an insulated shipping container, before being moved to mobile hutches with two doors, close to trees and shelter. In good weather, Pete opens both doors in the morning, then shoos them back inside at night. In between, the chickens spend as much time as possible outdoors, encouraged by the fact that Pete and Joy leave their food outside to encourage them to get outside.
The result is noticeable. The chickens grow much slower than the industry standard, and as a result the meat is more meaty – not chewy, per se, but it is darker and firmer, more chickeny than the white puffy stuff we’ve all become used to. When it is cooked there is much less water and fat. Partly, this is because the chooks move around a lot and partly because, as well as their organic feed, they scratch around in the dirt for grubs, so have a varied diet. “Because they’re using those muscles and joints, the meat is a lot darker,” Pete says. “There’s more taste. We get taste and texture, it doesn’t just melt in your mouth.”
For the McLeods, going properly organic and free-range was the only way to farm chickens. They don’t use antibiotics, and they don’t routinely treat for coxidiosis, which is commonplace in the chicken industry and usually treated with chemicals. Instead, they use garlic and herbs, but they also believe they get fewer problems because the birds are free to move around. “Sunshine,” Pete says, “is the best antibiotic of all.”
At Westwood, they raise 400 chickens at a time in each mobile shed: they take about twice as long to come to maturity as conventional chickens – somewhere between 55 and 70 days. They process chickens themselves, once a week, to supply a small number of butchers, restaurants and organic co-ops, along with farmers’ markets each weekend. It’s an intensive, costly process but cutting out the middleman means they can keep the prices down. Hardly any of it goes to supermarkets.
It also means they get to talk to customers: in recent years, the sales of offal and bones have increased, as people’s tastes have changed. The paleo movement has taken off, so they’ve recently experimented with making their own bone broths and stocks, to which they add their chicken and a few vegetables and herbs, which is consistent with their approach. “We shouldn’t routinely be putting antibiotics in our food, it’s sort of a no-brainer really,” Joy says. “We’re just giving people a healthy choice, because there isn’t a lot of real choice available when it comes to chicken.”
Lee Fish
The tiny village of Leigh – an hour and a half north of Auckland on the Matakana Coast – is about as close as you get to a proper fishing village in New Zealand. From this rocky little harbour, day boats head out into the northern reaches of the Hauraki Gulf, and up the coast of Northland, returning the same day with holds packed with snapper and kahawai and other inshore species, all of it caught using sustainable methods.
The fish are caught live, mostly on a long line, and dispatched very carefully using the Japanese method known as ikejime, then they’re packed standing up in ice. “That’s the beauty,” says Sales and Marketing Manager Sam Birch. “The quality and the sustainability go hand in hand.” There’s no impact on the seafloor, because they’re not dragging a net around, and there’s less bycatch because the fishermen are targeting particular species. If the fish is undersized, they unhook it and throw it back.
In the case of kahawai, this makes all the difference. It’s a fast-swimming, meaty fish which is traditionally regarded in New Zealand as good only for bait and smoking. Mainly, that’s because people don’t bleed them straight away: the blood oxidises and gives the fish a bitter, metallic flavour. Lee Fish bleed them straight away and treat them carefully, bringing them back to
shore within hours. This results in a beautifully delicate, sightly oily fish. “The fish is brilliant, it just doesn’t have a long shelf life,” says Birch. “Traditionally kahawai was presented to the market past its shelf life.”
For decades, New Zealanders weren’t able to get Lee Fish, which is the brand name of Leigh Fisheries Limited, the fishing company which has been operating since the 1950s. The industry had grown up in a peculiar way: it was a machine set up for filleting, stripping bone and skin out as fast as possible. Fish in this country was white and skinless, and there was no way of telling how fresh it was. To someone from another country, or a keen fisherman, it’s a terrible thing to do to fish.
In the 1990s, though – when New Zealand extended its exclusive economic zone, cutting out foreign fishing boats including those from Japan – Leigh Fisheries started working with master Japanese fishermen, who had particular and demanding ways of treating fish that meant it stayed fresh. “They knew we had good snapper,” says Birch. “So when we pushed them out 200 miles they said maybe you can sell it but you’ve got to learn how to catch it. It brought our fishermen up to a better standard.”
Since then, Lee Fish has grown internationally and now exports fish to Asia, Europe and the United States. It can land a fish in New York within 36 hours of it being caught but, until recently, New Zealand consumers couldn’t get it, which was the kind of thing people interested in food have become used to: despite producing great food, the best has usually been exported.
But for the past couple of years, Lee has been supplying New Zealand restaurants with fish that have been sustainably caught, properly treated and delivered whole. Each evening, Birch texts his chefs around New Zealand to tell them what’s coming in on the boats, how much they have and what it will cost. The chefs tell him what they need and, in the case of Auckland, it arrives the next morning in a box that tells them where it was caught, by which boat – and which captain drove the boat.
“We’re working with really tight and nice timeframes,” says Birch. “We’ve got New Zealand chefs getting the fish well before the guys in Europe, which is great.”
Story: Simon Farrell-Green.
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
