What’s your Wai?

Many of our wines come from places whose names confuse buyers.

Imagine you are a wine drinker in San Francisco or New York, keen to taste a sauvignon blanc from New Zealand. You’ve heard that the best come from Marlborough, but are they associated with a brand of cigarettes that has a similar name?

That’s just one of the challenges facing wine exporters. More serious confusion is caused by the fact that most of our labels highlight the names of regions and sub-regions where the grapes for the wine were grown. Browsing shelves overseas, you will find Kiwi wines from Wairau Valley, Waitaki Valley, Waipara

Valley, Wairarapa, Waimea Plains and Waiheke Island.

From Waitaki (weeping waters) to Wairarapa (glistening waters) and Waiheke (cascading waters), the prominence given on our wine labels to place names starting with Wai (the Māori word for water) is natural and widespread. The use of legally protected place names, such as Waipara or Waiheke Island, is also a guarantee to consumers that at least 85% of the wine comes from the stated area. But overseas – where more than 80% of our wine is consumed – major problems arise.

“It can be quite tricky when we are travelling overseas to explain the difference between wines from Martinborough and Marlborough, let alone between the Wairarapa and other New Zealand place names with wai in them,” says Pip Goodwin, chief executive of Martinborough’s Palliser Estate. Regional promotions of Wairarapa wines – covering the Martinborough and Gladstone subregions – are now being organised by a company, controlled by the wineries, called Wellington Wine Country.

The confusion between the wines of Waipara Valley and Wairarapa is also being tackled further south. In the past, winegrowers at Waipara, in North Canterbury, distanced themselves from “Canterbury” wines grown closer to Christchurch. New Zealand Winegrowers has long published separate statistics for Waipara and Canterbury, as though Waipara is not in Canterbury.

Change is under way. “Waipara has tended to be muddled with the many other Kiwi place names that start with Wai, and especially with the North Island wine region of Wairarapa,” says Waipara’s leading winery, Pegasus Bay, on its website. It announced recently that in future it will be “largely promoting our wines as coming from North Canterbury”.