What has always fascinated her is wine as a human system: who makes it, who sells it, who drinks it - and why so much gets lost in translation along the way.
Morven is the founder of Tradecraft, a consultancy working at the intersection of wine, strategy, marketing and storytelling, and the host of the Not Serious Wine Chats podcast. She has built a representation as a perceptive industry translator - between producers and distributors, brands and consumers, tradition and opportunity.
Her thinking was shaped early. As a teenager working at Chan's Garden Restaurant in Dunedin, she was inducted into formal tasting and food pairing by Raymond and Norman Chan. Around the same time, a formative Burgundy tasting hosted by Alan Brady at Mount Edward taught her something else entirely. Asked to give her tasting notes before the adults so she wouldn't be intimidated, Morv nervously admitted that all she could smell was sticking plasters. "And so began my education on brettanomyces," she laughs.
Those early experiences were reinforced when her parents planted one of Central Otago's early vineyards, Packspur in Lowburn, and she watched the community wrap around them. "You can't make wine alone," Morv says. "It's a craft that requires community. I really like that." The human lens sharpened further during her first official wine role at Montana Wines as Consumer Queries Manager, "a snazzy title for complaints lady", which she describes as "Consumer Studies 101 in learning how people perceive, buy and enjoy wine."
The idea for Tradecraft crystallised later during her time at Antipodes Water. Its founder, the late Simon Woolley, a longtime industry champion, became a close friend and mentor. Selling a premium water alongside wine gave a rare vantage point. "I became a fly-on-the-wall," she says. "I could see wineries struggling to communicate with distributors, and vice versa." Tradecraft began as a facilitation and mediation consultancy to address that gap, with strategy, marketing and storytelling quickly becoming core. "Nothing about selling wine is one dimensional," Morv says. "Investing in good marketing and succinct storytelling is no different from spending money on frost protection. It's about making sure the punter had something they can - and more impatiently, want to - buy."
Morv is impatient with industry jargon, seeing it as obscuring the real task. "Authenticity is just about being yourself," she says. "Which is hard, because winegrowing might be the only job where you're expected to be a great farmers, a brand designer, a salesperson, an accountant and an Instagram expert." In an overcrowded market, she's refreshingly blunt: "There are too many bloody wineries. It's noisy and the consumer is overwhelmed." Finding a distinctive voice, she believes, is essential. "At the risk of offending the industry, one wine isn't that different from another for the average Joe. So you have to work out what makes you tick and distil that into something easy to convey."
Her answer isn't less story, but better story, ideally one rooted in New Zealand rather than borrowed from elsewhere. For a young, export-focused industry, Morv sees opportunity. "We don't have 26 generations weighing us down," she says. "We're being invited to challenge, take risks and feel a bit counterculture. How exciting." Through both Tradecraft, and Not Serious Wine Chats, Morv hopes to help producers close the distance between themselves and drinkers. "Consumers want to pick up what New Zealand's putting down," she says. "We're just holding it slightly too far out of reach."
