The Balance: From fermenting to feinting with Oliver Styles

The co-owner of Halcyon Wines recently returned from the Commonwealth Fencing Championships in London, one of his former stomping pistes, coming 18th in the sabre - his weapon of choice. But he won more kudos in beating Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson in the foil, “which is all anyone wants to talk to me about”.

Growing up in Oxfordshire, Oliver knew little about fencing, except what he saw in old Errol Flynn swashbucklers, or the 1960s Avengers on TV, with John Steed wielding an umbrella-obscured sword. But when a university orientation in 1998 introduced him to the fencing club, he was immediately hooked. “I thought ‘oh, I’d like to hit people with swords; that sounds like fun’."

He went along with a couple of mates, “and it really gelled”, he says, admitting to being a sucker for the romance of the sport and its crisp white outfit. The friends dropped out but he stuck with it, and in his final year made it onto the university team, despite having no formal training. “I wasn’t very good,” he says, recalling a “deficit” situation at the end of the year, having received more hits than he’d given. “My net contribution to the team was pretty abysmal.”

Fencing is very physical, and you “sweat buckets”, but there’s strategy as well, in a martial art frequently compared to chess. He started out with foil, where the object is to strike with the point, but now specialises in sabre, which is based on a cutting and stabbing a cavalry weapon, with points allocated for a more complex array of strikes. That is very much about “snap decision making”, requiring a cool head, says Oliver, who soon realised that aggression does not work in fencing, but nor does complacency. "Having a calculating brain and physically moving wins out."

Oliver Styles. Photo Credit: Ash Scott

Oliver and his wife Amy Hopkinson-Styles were living and winemaking in Spain when they decided to have a vintage in the Wairarapa in 2011. In 2012 they came back to New Zealand, got married, did another vintage, then stayed. Oliver’s fencing gear came along for the journey, but unpacking it seemed hasty, given the closest training establishments 10 years ago were Wellington and Auckland. But Oliver tracked down a small club of people in the bay at around the same time as fencing coach Baz Clark arrived in the region, reinvigorating his ripostes.

In 2018, Amy and Oliver established Halcyon Wines, bringing learnings from Spain to their business, creating naturally fermented wines with no additions, from organic handpicked fruit. Now, when he’s not doing that, or writing about wine for Wine-Searcher and wine magazines (including New Zealand Winegrower) Oliver could well be found running or biking, or training with his sabre.

Fencing duals used to be to the death - or at the very least first blood - and even on the piste there were some “horrific” accidents in the past, he says. But these days the materials and technology used mean it is “an exceptionally safe sport, whereas I don’t think I would walk into a boxing ring quite so happily”.

It is, he claims, “kind of a useless skill”, but I can’t help but think he and sabre would be superb when it comes to ceremonial sabrage. En garde! Prêts?

Allez!