Murray Gibbons
Truck Stop
Murray Gibbons ready to park up
This story was written by Kat Pickford, for the October 2023 edition of Winepress and Winegrower Magazine
AFTER MORE than 40 years driving trucks, much of it transporting wine, Murray Gibbons is ready to hang up his keys. Murray never set out to be a truck driver, or a business owner for that matter, but when opportunity came knocking, he didn’t shy away. The only problem has been slowing down in an ever-expanding industry, he says. “I’m no businessman; just a truck driver who somehow ended up with a trucking business,” Murray says from ‘HQ’ – his tongue-in-cheek reference to the humble portacom tucked away on a corner site in Riverlands Industrial Estate, which houses operations for his company, Bulk Wine Distribution.
“I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to leave the industry, or slow down, or downsize, but I’ve failed miserably every time,” the 67-year-old says. “Somehow I ended up buying land, more trucks, wine tankers then a tanker wash.” His work has adapted to meet the needs of an ever-evolving industry. “If there’s one thing that’s constant in the wine industry, it’s change,” Murray says.
He made his start truck driving at Irvine’s Freightlines, and after purchasing his own truck and trailer contracted to what was then called Tranzlink and later became Toll Group. Nine years later he sold his truck after a car passed him on a blind corner and narrowly missed a head-on collision with an approaching vehicle. “I was sick of the mayhem on the road,” Murray says. “Then my good friend Roger Kendrick, who was doing wine carriage for the Marlborough Bottling Company [now WineWorks], asked me to help him out.” Not long after, Roger, who was a wine and mussel transport pioneer, suffered a heart attack and Murray ended up running the business for about four months while his friend recovered. “Back then he had about four tanks and three trailers and Marlborough Bottling Company only had two lines in a small building.”
It wasn’t long before things started growing very quickly to the point where Murray didn’t want to keep growing, so he got out of the Marlborough Bottling Company contract and focused on working directly with wineries instead.
By that stage Murray had bought the business from Roger, who had decided to sell due to his declining health. Sadly, Roger died in 2014 due to pancreatic cancer. After “floating around” for a while, Murray purchased an empty section on Kendrick Road (named for Roger) five or six years ago and despite his best intentions, the business has been growing steadily ever since.
Seeing a gap in the industry he also built a wine tanker wash, providing state of the art cleaning and sanitising technology for the region’s wine transporters. With tanks ranging in size from 570 - 24,700 litres, Murray has carved out a niche for himself, with the ability to handle smaller volume wine runs as well as bulk volumes. “Back in the day you could put almost any amount of wine in a tank and drive it to the bottling line, sploshing around in the back,” he says. “Until they decided that wasn’t good for the wine.” These days they use variable capacity tanks which can hold anything from 110 – 2,000 litres, he says “Don’t ask me why it’s not good for the wine; it’s all witchcraft. I don’t want to get involved in that, as long as I can shift their wine properly – that’s all that matters.”
One of the trickiest parts of the job is accessing wineries in large trucks, Murray says. “The wine industry stops and starts with trucks, yet when they’re designing these wineries, people seem to forget about access, or don’t allow for growth, making it increasingly difficult for trucks to get in and out.”
A personal highlight has been the connections he’s made over the years. “There’s a lot of good people in the industry, really neat people and I’ve seen them change and grow over the years, shift from one winery to another and they’re always up for a laugh or a joke.”
Trucking on for 43 years
Murray Gibbons was bemused when people started messaging him with congratulatory messages on November 17 2023 “Then my wife found the article, and I thought ‘oh my goodness me’.”
The owner of Bulk Wine Distribution didn’t attend the Marlborough Wine Show Celebration where his Wine Marlborough Lifetime Achievement Award was announced, thinking his invite was simply a polite gesture.
When the penny dropped, he decided to consider it an accolade for all the truckies of Marlborough’s wine industry. “We often say, ‘I wonder if anyone notices we start the process and we finish the process,” he says. “There’s an awfully large number of people out there that do the same as me.”
His trucking journey began in 1980, when he took a six-week temporary job with Irvines Freightlines. One of the biggest changes since has been the trucks themselves, he says. “It wasn’t how many there were but how old they were and how slow they were and how rough as guts they were. And how you felt at the end of a day.”
In 2004 Murray started trucking grapes and wines, and has built wonderful relationships in the industry ever since. Everyone in the valley knows and values him, says Saint Clair Family Estate winemaker Stewart Maclennan, adding that Murray will be missed when he sells his business, which is currently on the market. Until then Murray will keep on trucking, likely heading as far as he can from all the attention the Lifetime Achievement Award has cast on him.
Winepress January 2024/ p19