DEEP & MEANINGFUL
David Burton goes on a hunt for spring water
THANKS TO OUR VAST mountain ranges and aquifers, New Zealanders enjoy a wealth of clean drinking water. Aotearoa’s water stock amounts to more than 80,000 cubic metres per person annually – three times higher than the world average.
But while we began bottling aerated water as early as 1845, contemporary New Zealand has been slow to exploit the resource. Even today, we bottle just 0.002 per cent of the 10 trillion litres used by New Zealanders each year. Figuratively, this is a drop in the bucket; it equates to only about two teaspoons of a 10-litre bucket.
Some 80 per cent of our total water, estimated to be worth $8 billion, is stored in vast underground aquifers. As things stand, the industry brings in a little over $60 million a year.
Many of New Zealand’s 50-plus bottlers are clustered around the most productive aquifers. Best known is the famous Blue Spring at Putāruru in the Waikato, a tourist attraction so named because the water is so pure the spring has a crystal-blue appearance. The water seeps down from a protected forest reserve at ground level and is filtered through layers of sand and volcanic rock to the aquifer 300 metres below. This is the source of some 60 per cent of New Zealand’s bottled water, represented in brands such as Pump (owned by Coca-cola) Kiwaii, Te Waihou Reserve and New Zealand Quality Waters, with its Waiz New Zealand Blue Spring Water.
Several companies – Otakiri Springs, 1907water, U water and, most famously, Antipodes – draw pristine artesian waters from the Otakiri aquifer in the eastern Bay of
Plenty, assessed as New Zealand’s deepest high-quality water source.
The water here begins as rainfall on densely forested hills and, as with Blue Spring, takes decades to filter down through porous volcanic rock, which organically enriches the water en route to its collection in the aquifer 327 metres below. It is then driven by pressure to the surface.
Otakiri rose to prominence with industry pioneer Simon Woolley, founder of Antipodes Water Company. Formerly part-owner of Auckland’s legendary Cibo restaurant, Woolley woos the hospo industry to this day with his Antipodes’ bottle design, a thin-necked outgrowth of the vintage Kiwi beer flagon, which sits so elegantly on any restaurant table.
In Northland, an aquifer lies beneath virgin kauri forest at the Mt Pukekaroro
Scenic Reserve near Kaiwaka, the source for bottling company Kauri Springs.
Below the towering mountains of The Remarkables lies the Gibbston Valley spring source, at an altitude of 285 metres. There, 30-year-old snow and rain emerge as water for the Fleck brand, which claims to contain double the mineral level of most waters bottled in New Zealand.
420 Volcanic is so named because it’s from an aquifer below an extinct volcano on Banks Peninsula. Even Waiheke Island has a small aquifer, deep below the island, bottled at source in limited quantities by Waiheke Water.
Brands like this, bottled straight from the source, still contain all their original minerals (silica, bicarbonate, sulphate, sodium, potassium, calcium and magnesium) which have benefits for our health. Let’s drink to that. DAVID BURTON