A lot of bottle

Many vineyards in Marlborough depend on exporting their wine around the world. However, few can claim such a successful niche as Vicarage Lane Wines which has cornered a significant share of the market in Finland.

By Frank Nelson

Based on the outskirts of Blenheim, there is a boutique winery producing an average of around 110,000 bottles of sauvignon blanc per year – with the majority going to customers 17,000 kilometres away.

While the 5.6 million population of Finland are not great wine drinkers – their favourite tipple is vodka – bottles of the best-selling wine are being snapped up in their thousands.

As trends change, many of New Zealand’s major wineries are jostling for space in that remote European outpost but Vicarage Lane remains the biggest-selling New Zealand wine, accounting for about 20 per cent of all imports from this country. So, how does an eight-hectare block on Old Renwick Road manage to punch so far above its weight?

The vineyard is owned by John Kennard and his wife Satu Lappalainen and there’s the first clue: Satu is Finnish. She comes from a professional background in organisation, logistics and event management, so has a keen understanding of how things work in her home country.

“You can only sell alcohol in a liquor store (“Alko”) which is owned by the government,” she says. “The Finnish system is the government monopoly. So, you have to win a tender before your product can be in the shop.”

Vicarage Lane won its tender for Marlborough sauvignon blanc in 2007. Today they ship five different wines: primarily the sauvignon, a little sparkling savvy, plus very small quantities of riesling, pinot noir and pinot rosé, all from Canterbury.

The wines certainly stand out on the shelves of Alko: intertwined New Zealand and Finnish flags grace the bottle caps while labels feature the unique work of Finnish artist Sirpa Alalääkkölä, who lives in the Marlborough Sounds.

Satu had read about Sirpa in a Finnish newspaper and loved her distinctive and evocative style. So, she and John bought half a dozen of Sirpa’s paintings along with the rights to use the images on their bottles.

And if by now you’re thinking the name John Kennard sounds familiar, you’re another step closer to explaining the extraordinary success of Vicarage Lane.

John, most notably as co-driver with Hayden Paddon, has played a major role in cementing New Zealand’s storied international reputation in motorsport rallying.

The pair’s premier performance came during the 2016 World Rally Championship in Argentina when their Hyundai scorched to victory along 365km of gravel roads to notch this country’s most prestigious result on the world stage.

John was 57 at the time, making him the oldest co-driver to win a round of the world championship. A few months later his achievement was recognised closer to home when he was named Marlborough Sportsman of the Year.

Years of success have endeared John to the Finns for whom rallying is something of a national obsession; Finnish and French drivers have dominated the sport which, after ice hockey, is the second most popular in Finland.

The efforts of John and Satu have given Vicarage Lane almost cult status as a result of which their business is now on the map for tourists visiting New Zealand from Finland, Sweden, and even Germany.

“It got to the point where we were doing 40-seater buses at a time,” John said. Before Covid they might see four or five buses each year and tour operators are already booking ahead for next year once this country opens up again.

New Zealanders’ main access to Vicarage Lane is online though Satu says on special occasions a few bottles do find their way to Nelson’s small but supportive Finnish population.

Almost three decades in rallying began for John when he left Christchurch in 1990 and moved to the UK, his home for the next 13 years. Rallying, either in the car or running logistics behind the scenes, has since taken him all over the world, including periods living in Finland.

That’s where he met Satu in 2000 at which time the pair knew almost nothing about growing grapes, much less making and exporting their own wines. But that journey began to take shape two years later when John bought four hectares in St Leonard’s Road, about 5km west of Blenheim.

“There were two hectares of vines, a pony paddock and a house, and the intention was that someone would run it for us while we carried on living in Europe or Finland or wherever we were at the time,” he said.

However, the couple moved back to New Zealand in the summer of 2003 and almost 20 years later they own the block in Old Renwick Road, which they bought in 2018, and manage another 56 hectares.

Through all this, John has continued to juggle rallying commitments. “In theory I retired in 2017,” he jokes, though he and Paddon have just won this year’s New Zealand national rally championship.

And the recent announcement that this country is back on the World Rally Championship calendar next year has brought a sparkle to his eye as he goes about the business of putting Marlborough wine on tables across Finland.