ABOUT THE PRACTICE
Cordonry Viticulture Ltd has advised vineyard owners from an office on Princess Street since 2004.
HOW THE PRACTICE STARTED
The practice was founded by a viticulturist who had spent eleven years managing estate vineyards and had grown tired of watching good sites underperform because nobody was writing anything down. The first client was a four-hectare block whose owner could not understand why two adjacent rows ripened a fortnight apart. The answer was in a soil pit, and it took an afternoon.
Twenty-two seasons later the practice carries fourteen vineyards under season-long management and takes on perhaps twenty shorter engagements a year. It has stayed deliberately small: three viticulturists and an office manager. Past that size, the person who visits your vineyard stops being the person who wrote your programme.
WHAT INDEPENDENCE MEANS HERE
We take no commission from nurseries, contractors, agrichemical suppliers or equipment dealers. We hold no ownership interest in any vineyard we advise. We do not make wine, and we do not broker fruit — both of which would put us on the other side of a negotiation from our own clients.
This costs money. Consultancies that take supplier commission can charge lower fees, and we lose work to them. It is still the right structure, because the alternative is advice whose value you cannot verify.
THE WAIRARAPA
We work almost entirely within a ninety-minute drive. Local knowledge in viticulture is not sentiment — it is knowing which terrace sits on the old riverbed, which sites the spring frost finds, and which contractor turns up when it matters. That knowledge does not travel, so neither do we.
THE TEAM
Three consulting viticulturists and an office manager. Between them the consultants hold a postgraduate viticulture qualification, twenty-two, sixteen and nine seasons of vineyard experience respectively, and one is a qualified soil scientist.
We list experience rather than names because clients engage the practice, and because the person who walks your blocks should be the one whose availability suits your season, not the one whose photograph you liked.
