TIM TURVEY
Accidental winemaker
It was a sunny afternoon in the summer of 1987. Tim Turvey was sitting on a plastic chair drinking wine with friends in the middle of a barren, stony Hawke’s Bay paddock, when it struck him.
Everything had led to that point. The 33-year-old was doing exactly what he was meant to be doing, he thought to himself.
The paddock, a stone’s throw from the beach at Te Awanga, would in time be covered in grapes and become the birthplace of some of the country’s best chardonnays. But all that was still ahead of him.
The paths that brought Turvey to that point were many and varied, of course, but it’s reasonably safe to say their genesis lay in the form of two small, cut-crystal drinking glasses, no bigger than an egg cup.
These tiny vessels were given to him by his parents when he was little more than an infant, so he could enjoy a glass of wine with them as they ate dinner.
It wasn’t normal, but his parents, Max and Jane, weren’t ones for normal. They were both in their 40s when they had Tim – considered quite a late age to start parenting in the 1950s – and had led full and successful lives.
Max retired when Tim, an only child, was three months old and moved the family from Wellington to the shores of Lake Taupo¯ , where Max rebuilt the (still running and very popular) Waitahanui Lodge, and added a shop and five cabins.
After six years at the lodge the family moved to Hawke’s Bay. Until he was about 10, Tim accompanied his parents on numerous overseas trips, by ocean liner, to Europe, the Mediterranean and all over the Pacific. They’d also covered New Zealand in an old ambulance converted into a kind of campervan.
Tim tired of the gallivanting life and, when his parents said they were to embark on a year-long world cruise, he said he’d ‘‘had enough of this nonsense’’ and went to boarding school instead.
After Rathkeale College, near Masterton, he went to Massey University, where he nearly completed a BA, but chose instead to open a photographic studio in central Palmerston North.
Max was cut from Kiwi pioneer stock, where if you wanted something done you did it, learning as you went. It’s a trait that passed unfettered to son, who has spent a life teaching himself skills and taking on tasks that might appear daunting to others.
‘‘If you’ve got a passion for something, you’re better learning it yourself rather than do some crazy course and spend the rest of your life learning what they were trying to teach you,’’ Turvey says.
He’s not short on confidence. ‘‘I’ve never had a failure, as far as I can see . . . But I put much of that down to the support I’ve had from mates, wives, staff and family, to be honest.’’
He taught himself how to develop rolls of film and ran the studio for two years before deciding he’d had enough of being in a dark room, so he began an agricultural contracting business back in Hawke’s Bay.
After a few years of that, plus a stint in Mahia working on cray boats in between surfing, he and his girlfriend (and future wife) Margie headed off on their OE. It was 1978. They made it as far as Sydney, where Turvey worked as a welder on a steel yacht, before heading to northern New South Wales to work on a sugar cane farm.
That led to his being shoulder-tapped to help develop and run a 180-hectare pineapple farm at Byron Bay. ‘‘I didn’t know anything about pineapples. I thought they grew on a tree. It became very successful. We spent about three years doing that before coming home to have our first child.’’
Katie was born in 1982. A couple of years later she was joined by sister Gemma.
It was 1986 when Tim and Margie found a 20ha block of land for sale at the western edge of Te Awanga. They paid $76,000 for the overgrown, unkempt block. It had one tree on it, a 100-year-old olive, and a house that was little more than a shack. ‘‘It was pretty rugged land . . . I mean really rugged. The well was hand dug. You had to start a motor to get water into the house,’’ he recalls.
At that stage they had little idea what they’d do with the land, which they’d named Clearview. ‘‘We were half hippies back then. I was thinking of growing sweetcorn and maybe a few other things.’’
He borrowed a tractor and began mowing the metre-high grass that covered the section. ‘‘The more I mowed it, the more interesting it became. There were little signs with ‘Merlot’ and ‘Chardonnay’ written on them. At one point I hit something substantial. It turned out to be a ‘Vidals No.2 vineyard’ sign. I knew Vidals had once had vines out here somewhere, but didn’t know it was here.’’
One day, as he was mowing the grass, a man by the name of David Ward came up the driveway. ‘‘He said, ‘I want you to set up a block of grapes for me. Everybody tells me that you’re the man to do it’. I told him grapes were about the only thing I hadn’t grown, and that he’d be better getting someone else. But he was insistent.’’
They proved a perfect pairing. Turvey helped Ward develop a 20ha block of grapes in the Tukituki valley and in the process ‘‘fell in love with that whole grape thing’’.
The grapes, Dr Hogg Muscat, were popular and sold well, but vastly more profitable for the pair was a pine nursery they started nearby. They sold a massive number of sapling pines; eight million alone in their fourth year.
The first grapes Turvey planted at Clearview were four rows of cabernet franc. They were followed by eight rows of chardonnay, then he taught himself to press the grapes and to make and bottle the wine.
Life and work became hectic around then. His marriage ended, then he formed a relationship with the woman who would become his second wife, Helma van den Berg, with whom he’d have a third daughter, Bella.
When the former Ford Motors tractor workshop in Hastings came up for sale, he bought it for $1000, dismantled it with three mates and re-erected it at Clearview. It became the winery, and still is today.
Then he and Helma decided to open a restaurant. That was late 1991, by which stage they had three vintages of wine to sell.
‘‘Everyone said it would never work . . . ‘There’s nothing else out here’, they’d say, and ‘who the hell is going to go out for lunch?’ Noone went out for lunch back then.’’
It worked. They’d sold out of all their own wine within three months. They hired a chef, who began with one gas barbecue, then a domestic oven, then, after about three years, a commercial oven. ‘‘It was all very organic. My whole life is organic. There’s not much control over anything,’’ Turvey says.
It was around that time that he took a seat on that plastic chair and concluded he was where he should be.
Many, many vintages, numerous awards, and another marriage (to Kirsten) later, Turvey – who turns 70 in January – can still be found most days in or around the winery and restaurant. Or playing tennis somewhere. Or hanging out with the (six) grandkids.
Clearview makes about 30 varieties of wine, selling some 300,000 bottles a year, 99% of them in New Zealand.
Turvey wouldn’t change things for quids. ‘‘Local kids will come in at the age of 10 to get a job polishing the glasses. Then they start waiting on tables . . . developing over time to be really astute waiting staff. It’s like an initiation into life at a really early stage.
‘‘Ten or 20 years later they’ll come back with their children . . . Now they’re a corporate lawyer or something living in London or wherever. They’ll say ‘Tim, is that you?’ I’ll be thinking ‘Who the hell is that’, then remember she was the 10-year-old girl with the lisp.
‘‘I take my hat off to people who run their own business and go out and help the community. I’ve never got the time for that, but I think my little restaurant and vineyard is a little microcosm of life and where I do my little bit to help. That’s the bit about all of it that I really like . . . and the wine, of course.’’
‘‘My whole life is organic. There’s not much control over anything.’’