Lawson’s Dry Hills
A deluge amid the decades
This story was written by BRENDON BURNS for the August 2023 edition of Winepress.
Lawson’s Dry Hills was one of the few wineries in Marlborough when it opened in time for the rain-besieged 1995 vintage. Its owners Barbara and Ross Lawson, who planted Gewürztraminer on Alabama Road in 1981, had put in decades of hard work to get to this point. But that wet vintage took the cake, Barbara says. “We’d planned to do 100 tonnes. Suddenly we had winemakers from all over New Zealand here.”
Photo: Barbara and Ross Lawson
The winery’s single small press was operating 24/7 as companies that typically sent fruit to the North Island, reacted to the onset of rot. “We were one of the very few wineries in Marlborough. We had a few small tanks with our own grapes to process,” Barbara says, recalling other winemakers putting grapes through the crusher and cold settling them in tankers.
She helped manage the onslaught while working fulltime as a theatre nurse at Wairau Hospital. It was there that she’d met Ross in 1963, when she was an 18-year-old nurse and he was wheeled in with injuries caused after a few drinks. They married in 1965, then moved to outback Australia, where Ross was shearing, to live in a caravan with the first of their three children. In the late 1960s they bought 4.4 hectares of land on Alabama Rd and built their home, block by block, largely funded by possums Ross had trapped. Barbara helped clean the skins. “I smelt like a possum too.”
Later, Ross became a skilled swimming pool installer, and in 1981 they took the advice of Penfolds viticulturist Steve Carter and planted Gewürztraminer. “We’d never heard of it – couldn’t even pronounce the name.” Another viticulturist told them it’d never be anything, but Merlen winemaker Almuth Lorenz was thrilled with the quality and took it all. In 1992, the first Lawson’s Dry Hills vintage was made by Claire Allan, with Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Gewürztraminer. “Every time the Gewürzt won a gold medal, we waved it in the face of the doubting viticulturist,” Barbara says.
Her work at Wairau Hospital had also led to her meeting winemaker Mike Just, on a hospital trolley awaiting tendon surgery, and in 1996 he joined the winery team. Around that time, Barbara stepped back from fulltime nursing, having long juggled career, family and the expanding winery, although she continued part-time and casual in theatre until 2005.
By the early 1990s, they had started exporting to the United Kingdom, after their shared Irish ancestry led them on a holiday to Ireland. Seeing Cloudy Bay in a Galway wine shop, they met the importer. Irish and other buyers liked the Lawson’s style, Barbara says. “We were just Kiwis. We weren’t highfalutin types. We just talked about what we had created and New Zealand.”
Back home, she marketed the wines and prepared food for sale at the winery, where Heidi and Chris Gibb also ran a restaurant for several summers. In the mid-1990s, Tim Evill invested in Blenheim’s Hotel d’Urville and met the Lawsons. “We put it to him that what we needed was more vineyards,” Barbara says.
Tim and his wife Pauline’s developed some vineyards with Ross and Barbara in Marshlands and the Waihopai Valley. By then Lawson Dry Hills had Sion Barnsley as Business Manager, Marcus Wright as winemaker, and trained viticulture staff to replace the self-taught Ross, who died in 2009. Barbara, who sold her remaining shares to the Evills in 2014, now divides her time between Blenheim and Rarotonga. Older Lawson Dry Hills wines remain her favourite; none, however from the 1995 vintage.