Feature
The matriarch
by Bruce Ansley
Next month, Rippon Vineyard and Winery, a South Island family-run business, launches the first pinot noir of its second-generation winemaker – and driven Southern Woman Lois Mills is planning to bow out.
By crikey, you think, as you round a bend in the long, long driveway and arrive at the long, long house, this woman has done all right for herself.
Even by Wanaka property standards, tilting in their more grandiose fancies towards southern Tuscan or colonial chateaux, the house is a beaut. Buttressed foundations support a pile staunching up to the sharp Wanaka landscape. A row of mullioned windows peers over the lake and mountains.
Well, yes, says Lois Mills, matriarch of the Rippon Vineyard and Winery that spreads grandly around, she has made a small fortune, but, as they say in the wine industry, you have to start with a large one.
I don’t know how to take this. Several Wanaka people have pleaded poverty to me, from within their handsome halls. Perhaps it’s a local custom. Also, Mills had told me the previous night that a million dollars didn’t go very far these days. It still goes quite a long way by my own standards.
So, here’s Mills sitting in her living-room beneath a bevy of artists, four Hoteres (Hotere designed a label for Rippon), a Toss Woollaston, a Jane Evans, wondering what the new snow on the mountains means for the vintage, rolling her own from a packet of Drum with just a touch of larrikin and I’m thinking that she’s Southern Woman, the other side of those stringy blokes who go around in long raincoats being laconic about Auckland. Tough in business, they say. She says.
A success story, I thought, but the old Bentley in the garage should have told me that it was a love story, instead.
Lois married Rolfe on his 47th birthday. She was a month over 21. Rolfe was a widower. The eldest of his three children was scarcely younger than she. She was a country dental nurse, he the scion of a big South Island firm, Sargood Son and Ewen. He’d fought in World War II, in submarines, she’d peered into children’s mouths. She met him at a wedding and, egged on by her mother, rang and invited him to a ball. He said, “It’ll be fun.” She says, “He was pretty dashing. He drove a 1939 Bentley, a bit posh for Riversdale.”
Of all those differences, age was the least. She says, “Age never mattered to me. I don’t mind getting older myself.” She is 55.
Rolfe was an only child and his family were well-heeled. His grandfather owned Wanaka Station, possibly once attractive only to merinos, but now such prime Wanaka real estate that agents’ superlatives bounce off its glossy lots. Rolfe dreamt of living there, and no one could blame him for that. He was sitting on the most beautiful part of the loveliest lake in the country. He’d noticed the similarity with the Douro Valley in Portugal. It was no contest: office drudgery at his newly merged firm versus the lakeside dream. So Rolfe and Lois and their own three children moved to Wanaka, where Rolfe made history pioneering the Central Otago wine industry, planting the first grapes in 1975. Varieties included the pinot noir that made Rippon famous, but was then popularly regarded as ordinary. “Rolfe was a dreamer, it was his vision,” she says.
Wanaka was a small town in the 70s. Mills grappled with it. She took a friend’s advice: “Don’t slop around in your dressing-gown. When you get up in the morning, get prepared as if you’ve got visitors coming at eight, put your lipstick on every day. And I’ve done that every day of my life.”
But other matters were more pressing. They had no income. “Very scary with three children, two at boarding school.” They sold land to develop their business, teetered on the edge of bankruptcy in 1988 when the sharemarket crash took their land sales with it.
One day in 1989, Mills was in the garage looking at the stacks of wine, and wondering what they’d do with it all, when she realised: nothing. Nothing was going to happen unless she did it herself. So she put ads in the paper and set up a little shop and bought some glasses and T-shirts and in a weekend sold $300 of wine – a small step in the trade, but a giant one for Lois Mills. Rolfe grew the grapes and made pinot noir and riesling and other wines, Lois sold it. The business partnership was as successful as their other one. “It was fun to make the dream a reality. Okay, it wasn’t my dream to begin with, but I believe I made it a reality. Otherwise, I think we would have gone broke.”
They’d been married 30 years when Rolfe died in 2000 and was lauded as one of the great vignerons. To an outsider, he seems alive still. The Bentley remains in the garage, ready to go. She talks of him in the present tense as if, indeed, he has merely gone into another room. She says she is lonely, but I think a man would have a job on his hands trying to replace Rolfe.
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