Te Whare Ra

The Free Bacchus Story

Te Whare Rā is Māori for house in the sun. Allen and Joyce Hogan planted the vineyard at Renwick in 1979 and built the winery from mud bricks made on the property. It was the region’s first small, privately owned winery, as Jamie Goode tells it, and the first wine made there, in 1982, was a Müller-Thurgau. The estate says those 1979 plantings are now the oldest vines in Marlborough.

Jason and Anna Flowerday, back from Australia, bought it in 2003. People told them the old vines were finished and would have to come out. Anna remembers soil like concrete, with nothing living in it. Jason sowed his first cover crops that winter, in 2004, and they have built the soil ever since on what they call the three Cs: cover crops, compost and cowshit. Soil organic matter has gone from about 2 per cent to around 7, which they reckon amounts to a 13.6-million-litre dam under the vineyard.

They moved the vineyard to organic and biodynamic management in 2007 and gained full BioGro certification in 2012, and they named their single-vineyard range after the licence number, SV5182. The biodynamic side is practice, not certificate. They make their own preparations and compost teas, but Te Whare Ra is not certified biodynamic, as The Real Review noted when it named the Flowerdays its first New Zealand Vignerons of the Year in 2025.

To most people Marlborough means Sauvignon Blanc, but the Flowerdays have spent two decades on the grapes of Alsace: Riesling, Gewürztraminer and Pinot Gris. Toru, Māori for three, is all three fermented together as a field blend, with spice from the Gewürztraminer, backbone from the Riesling and texture from the Pinot Gris. One wine sits outside the certificate: the TWR Sauvignon Blanc, blended with fruit from a vineyard in the upper Awatere.