Ursula Schwarzenbach, an owner of Blackenbrook Vineyards.
Ursula Schwarzenbach, an owner of Blackenbrook Vineyards.
This week, Small Business editor Caitlyn Sykes talks to business owners about German connections.
Ursula Schwarzenbach and her husband Daniel founded Tasman-based Blackenbrook Vineyards in 2001.
Can you talk me through the connections your business has with Germany?
There are several connections to Germany. By volume, we currently export about 45 percent of our wine, and Germany is one of our biggestexport markets - and very similar in size to our other main export market, Japan. Our first shipment to Germany - 84 cases of wine - left here in July 2013 and we're lucky to have a great import partner, who puts a lot of time and effort into marketing our wines in Germany and growing the demand. At the moment we have an entire container of wine on the way to Germany, which is the first container order ever for us.
Daniel and I are both Swiss, from the German part of Switzerland; he came to New Zealand as a child with his family in 1975, and I followed in 1998 after we met and got married in Switzerland. And even though our culture and language are different to the culture and language of Germany, we still understand how they operate. That's been a huge help in terms of developing our export market there.
Daniel actually worked for a season at Weingut Engelhof, the southernmost winery in Germany, after he studied winemaking and viticulture at Lincoln. He wanted to learn as much as possible about European ways of making wine, and being Swiss and still fluent in Swiss-German he chose to work in the German-speaking parts of Europe. Every year now we employ a German intern at our vineyard for up to six months to give them the same opportunity Daniel enjoyed in Europe.
One other connection is that every August Daniel flies back to Germany to act as a senior wine judge at the Mundus Vini International Wine Award. It's a big competition and a great opportunity to network with winemakers, professional wine traders, sommeliers and expert journalists.
Ursula and Daniel Schwarzenbach, owners of Blackenbrook Vineyards.
You mentioned you'd developed a good relationship with your partner in Germany. How did that relationship come about?
We wanted to have our wines available in Europe so we could direct enquiries from tourists who have visited here, and from our friends and connections in Europe to an importer. Germany seemed a logical choice because of our Germanic background, its large size and its high penetration of wine drinkers.
For quite a few years we tried to get our wines in there and had them briefly represented by a small importer in Wurzburg. Unfortunately his business went under, which was a bad experience for us, so we had a break of three or four years before we began with our current importer in 2013. I'd actually contacted the same business a few years earlier without success, but in 2013 he'd decided to put more focus on developing the wine side of his business and contacted us.
He loves the fact the German culture is really familiar to us, that we can communicate in German and have a Germanic approach to business. We're in constant email contact, chatting about what's happening here and sending photos, forwarding contacts and enquiries and hearing how they're getting on in the marketplace. Daniel also visits them once a year and the owner and his partner spent some of their last New Zealand holiday here at Blackenbrook.
What have been the main challenges you've encountered developing an export market in Germany?
Germany's wine market is very price-driven and dominated by two large supermarket chains, which makes life extremely tough for independent wine merchants. When marketing our wines to Germany we work out a good shelf-price for our wines with our importer's input and work back to the FOB price. This may end up being slightly lower than our standard FOB prices, but if the wines aren't priced correctly they won't sell.
