March 28, 2025

So you’ve had your guess in our 19th annual vintage sweepstake to guess the total tonnes of wine grapes harvested in New Zealand? We can now reveal just who in our industry are optimists and who are the pessimists!

To be fair to everyone, we can’t remember a trickier vintage to try to estimate – the yields were enormous, the weather was friendly, but the wineries were limiting their intakes because they’ve still got a bit of last year’s vintage in tank. Anything could have happened and did! Vineyards that were told they couldn’t send their grapes in to the winery harvested them anyway, to have a crack at bottling their crop themselves, and selling on the bulk market. And then the final clincher: there’s only so much stainless tank storage available in New Zealand.

But you’ve gotta love the extremists whose mindset we can only wonder at: Dave McDonald of Bladen, bless him, is feeling grim and predicting only 300,001 tons, while his polar opposite, Peter Cowley of Te Mata Estate reckons that 650,000 tons will appear in the presses. Mein Gott! We’ll be swimmming in grapes! To have a look at the poster of who guessed what, click on this link

Now what? NZ WineGrowers’ Philip Gregan will release the total tonnage some time in June. As before, if you predict it exactly, you’ll get a crisp $100 note, personally delivered by our founder, Tim. We’ve doubled the prize money, and there will be a $100 note for the WineWorks entrants, and another $100 note for the rest of the industry.  You’ll be notified where you sit in the entries after the entries close.