Go hard until the wheels come off

Monday morning David Morgan, a Marlborough wine guide, collected me at the Vintners Retreat and we spent the day popping in at half a dozen wineries. His job was to drive and to introduce me to the winemakers and winery owners. My job was to drink. We both fulfilled our missions admirably.

David, who has bushy copper-colored hair and a ruddy complexion that looks as if it’s always a little sunburnt, is the ideal man for a mission like this. He seems to know everybody in Marlborough and has the sort of perky Kiwi personality that allows him to roust a winery owner out of the back office, where they may be hunched over a computer doing the books, to come out and join us for a glass of Pinot Gris or something out in the garden.

This is exactly what he did at our first stop, Kathy Lynskey Wines. Kathy, her blond hair tied up in a no-nonsense ponytail, was working in her office at the winery when David burst in and announced that she had a visitor—me—and that she needed to put on a clean shirt and come join us (evidently she’d been working on a piece of equipment at the winery before doing the books and had grease stains all over her tattered polo shirt).

She washed up, changed, and then came out into her rose garden behind the tasting room holding a bottle of Gewürztraminer.

“Thank you for dragging me out of the office,” she said to David, and she meant it. “I forget sometimes how lovely it is to just sit in the garden and have a glass of wine unless I have visitors.”

Kathy’s winery isn’t particularly large—she produces only about 6,000 case of single vineyard and reserve wines a year—but she and her companion, Kent Castro, pretty much do everything here, from manning the tasting room to growing and crushing the grapes. I asked her if that wasn’t just a tad bit exhausting.

“Actually, it’s totally exhausting,” she said. Then she told me a story of how, shortly after she’d started in the winery in the late 90s, she’d realized that she pretty much was going to have to do everything herself since she didn’t have money to hire a winemaker or sales director.

“So I had a chat with my dad and explained to him how hard I was working and asked for his advice. He said, ‘You’re young enough. Go as hard as you can until the wheels come off.’” She laughed. “Best advice anyone’s ever given me,” she said, pouring herself another glass of wine. Then she got up to go smell the roses in her garden. And I did as well.