Working on the bleeding edge

Working on the bleeding edge

This story was written by Sophie Preece, for the December 2023 edition of Winepress.

Photo: Richard Briggs

Dave Pearce loved chess as a kid, which perhaps explains his habit of looking ahead before making a move.

It’s the kind of considered foresight that saw him and a handful of others launch the groundbreaking Screwcap Initiative in 2001, and made Grove Mill the world’s first carbon neutral winery in 2006, having already pioneered the use of a eucalypt woodlot for winery wastewater.

Years later Dave adopted the term “the bleeding edge” to describe the times people considered him “crazy” for bypassing the status quo. “I spent I don’t know how many years being ‘an idiot’ because I thought carbon zero was a good idea,” he says. “It’s great to be at the bleeding edge, but generally you bleed.”

Speaking at the Marlborough Wine Show Celebration Evening in November, where he was presented one of four Wine Marlborough Lifetime Achievement Awards for 2023, Dave said the biggest achievements are the ones no-one thinks of, because the change is so embedded; transformed from unusual to ubiquitous. Surrounded by wines sealed by screwcap, he noted that few people would recall how bizarre that prospect seemed 20 years ago. The same goes for Sauvignon Blanc, he said to the audience, none of whom would be surprised to see the region’s flagship variety win Champion Wine of Show. “But 26 years ago it was ‘impossible’,” Dave said. In 1996 Grove Mill broke that rule, taking top spot in a major New Zealand wine show. “That had never been done before.” Carbon neutrality isn’t quite there yet, he adds. “In 20 years’ time I think it’ll make the list. From ‘crazy to do it’ to ‘crazy not doing it’ in 40 years — a little too long.”

With a father in the air force, Dave lived in many places as a child, starting school in Fiji, then moving to Redwoodtown primary school in Blenheim (“although I will never be a local”), before school in Wellington, and finally Henderson High School in Auckland.

Henderson was the heart of New Zealand wine country in 1978, when Dave left school aged 17 to work at Corbans Wines, “pretty much right next door”. It was not a glib decision, but one he based on three key factors, looking well down the track at job prospects. “I am not one of the many, many who happened into the industry after university. I wanted to join the industry from when I was 17,” Dave says. 

“I liked drinking wine, and I liked the seasonality of it…I liked that if you do well, your achievement is obvious. You get to bring home what you make.” He also believed the career would see him get better and more valuable the longer he spent in it, “which is not true of all jobs”.

For the first year he worked as a cellar hand and then a laboratory technician, then went to Massey University for a four-year Food Technology degree, while working summer jobs as a distiller and cellar hand supervisor at Corbans.

In 1983 Dave moved to Gisborne as a trainee winemaker with the company, and had his first taste of Marlborough fruit, trucked up for processing. “Every year I noticed that about 9,000 tonnes of Gisborne fruit was pretty good and 500 tonnes of Marlborough fruit was better,” he says. “It didn’t take me long to think that if I wanted to be good at winemaking, I had to get a good supply of fruit. It was inevitable that I would move to Marlborough.”

In 1988, after the devastation of Cyclone Bola, Dave took a job for the new Grove Mill wine company, helping establish its original winery in the century-old Malthouse building in Blenheim, with the first wines made there in 1989. The wine industry was not very popular back then, he adds. “Locals weren’t awfully chuffed to see all these people showing up with different habits and haircuts, growing beards, and wearing white gumboots around town.”

In 1994 that “changed dramatically”, with winemakers going from “persona non grata” to everyone’s pick on a wine options team. 1994 also saw Grove Mill get a brand-new winery in the Waihopai Valley. “You should judge a winery by the quality of the product it makes. And we turned out some fantastic products,” Dave says. “It was a good little winery.”

Once there he drove a wetland restoration, the wastewater woodlot of coppiced eucalypts, as well as the “crazy” carbonzero certification, consistently bemused at the industry’s satisfaction with the status quo. “It’s not why did I do it? It’s why didn’t everyone else do it?” The shareholders were on board, “because when it comes down to it, good sustainability is good business”, he adds.

Dave had 23 years at Grove Mill, before moving to contract winemaking facility VinLink, via vintage with Jeff Clarke at Ara Wine Estate and helping make the first wine for Four Hawk Day. It was a busy nine years at VinLink, starting with a nine month push to build an 11,000-tonne winery, staff it, and set up operations in time for the 2012 vintage. Then came expansion to 25,000 tonnes, two earthquakes, two major earthquake claims, two lots of repairs, and a global pandemic.” But he thrived, Dave says, having resigned nine years to the day after he started, in order to retire.

Forty-five years after he left school, and his chess team, to follow a career in wine, Dave says the journey has been taken with “a lot of very, very clever people”, which the industry naturally attracts. “And in the end the most satisfaction I have had has been mentoring people who worked for me. I have very much liked doing that.”