Alan Brady: Central Otago's Pinot Noir Pioneer at 90

However, the lure of the perfect Pinot Noir remains strong. It is "the Holy Grail," he says in the wake of his 90th birthday. "Probably always just out of reach."

Alan planted the first grapes in Gibbston in 1981, "a mad blunder into the unknown", to prove that grapes would grow at the bottom of the wine world. After Gibbston Valley came Mount Edward in 1998, "a more calculated decision" conceived as a place for him to make wine and learn on the job "without risking other people's investments". When Alan sold it in 2004, aged 67, he assumed he was done. He wrote a memoir, grew restless, and started Wild Irishman. "This is a tough industry to exit," he says drily.

When a friend and mentor, Cambolle-Musigny winemaker François Millet, told him "people like us shouldn't stop doing what we love", Alan embraced the advice growing Wild Irishman beyond "a nice little hobby to ease me into retirement", with (fellow Irishman) winemaker Brian Shaw now providing "the energy in our new little winery". Together they produce six single vineyard wines from Gibbston, Bannockburn and Alexandra fruit, and Alan talks about their work in terms of listening rather than imposing. "We've learned so much about how the personalities of those sites is reflected in the wines when we 'listen' to what nature is saying to us. Humility is the key to understanding the message from the terroir."

The pioneering generation contributed "tenacity" to Central Otago's wine story, he says. "We weren't afraid of the unknown and we learned how to collaborate and work together as we planted vines where they weren't expected to grow." But it was the winemakers who followed, often "lured here by the romance of Pinot Noir", who put the region on the map, he adds. Would he have done anything differently? "I'd have started sooner! I was 45 when I stumbled into this magical world, and there's more to learn than you can squeeze into one lifetime."

Alan still walks the vineyard outside his window in Alexandra daily. His palate, he notes, remains intact, "and that might be the biggest blessing", though his dreams are a bit less ambitious: "maybe another season, another vintage." But his view of what Central Otago’s wines can and should be remains uncompromising. “Pinot likes it here,” he says. “We can squander that gift by manufacturing homogenised wines to meet a perceived demand, or we can remain humble, delivering wines which reflect our diverse region with clarity and truth.”