Pernod Ricard Winemakers Environmental & Sustainability Director Alex Kahl asks whether winegrowers have considered the impact of traditional viticulture on a vineyard’s soil health and long-term sustainability.

OPINION: Comparative Tastings are an expensive but potentially effective strategy for a wine producer to raise the image of their wine or wines.

OPINION: I have a 50% share in a vineyard and for the first time ever, snails are threatening to decimate my crop.

OPINION: Each week I receive a newsletter called Areopagus, with ‘seven short lessons’ on various historical figures, classical music, paintings, architecture, rhetoric and writing, finishing with a philosophical question. It’s fascinating.

OPINION: The news could not have been more concerning – an industry member deliberately and illegally imported grapevines into New Zealand, and then grew those vines in one of our major winegrowing regions, thereby threatening the livelihoods of friends, neighbours, and colleagues in the industry, and potentially the wider primary sector.

OPINION: In this edition we check out vintage perspectives from around New Zealand, with many reporting lighter than typical yields in a delightfully disease-free harvest.

OPINION: Harvest begins, and almost immediately we start to get media enquiries about how the vintage is going and whether it is going to be a good year for New Zealand wine.

OPINION: Rachael Cook is the smiling grape grower on this month’s cover, tending vines on the miniscule, beautiful and dream-driven vineyard she and her husband Murray have created on an east facing hillside of Marlborough’s Brancott Valley.