List of access keys Homepage Site Map Search ContactUs Skip to main content

Mission Estate tastes success in Europe

By Matt Philp

Mission Estate’s ties to Europe go back further and are more significant than any other New Zealand winemaker. For more than a century, successors of the original French missionaries who founded the winery were regularly dispatched by the Marist Order to France to learn winemaking skills they could bring to bear on grapes ripened by the Hawkes Bay sun.

Despite that heritage, it’s surprisingly only recently that Mission has made a serious commitment to exporting to Europe.

During the 1990s and early noughties, while newer and far less storied New Zealand labels were launching a high profile assault on the Old World’s winelists, Mission chose instead to concentrate on consolidating its domestic market position, rebranding, repackaging and attempting to address the problem of an inconsistent product.

Later, when it started to look at joining the drive to sell wine offshore, it ran into capacity constraints.

But since the building of a new 2,000 tonne winery in 2004, Mission Estate has been steadily ramping up its exports to Europe, concentrating mostly on the United Kingdom, but also selling into Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands. Chief Executive Peter Holley says, a bit like making great wine, the strategy was driven by a desire to get the timing just right.

“It’s really only in the last six years that we’ve had the ability to produce wines in a fully accredited facility that would allow us to provide a truly competitive offering in those overseas markets.”

“The evolution of our wines is also starting to be noticed by opinion formers and the top end wine connoisseurs who are buying and drinking our wines.”
In any case, it never hurts to let others pave the way.

“The Marlborough producers had by that time carved a good inroad into the United Kingdom, with excellent, high quality products. For us to coat-tail behind that made good sense. So yes, you could argue we were tugged along by general interest in New Zealand wine.”

There was also, he adds, growing interest among European wine cognoscenti about Hawkes Bay wines in particular.