24 March 2001, The Daily Telegraph (London)

My Brilliant New Career

Sam Neill's New Zealand vineyard is no mere film star's whim. It is the expression of his love for his home, his land and the pinot noir. Richard Neill (no relation) meets him.

By Richard Neill

I make a note that it needs to be tasted again when the wine is a bit older and the taster less tired.

Sam Neill's winery is about as far away from Hollywood as you can get. Hidden away on an industrial estate on the edge of a blink-and-you'll-miss-it town somewhere near the bottom of the South Island of New Zealand, the actor's new career is being played out in totally glamour-free conditions.

Faced with an address that begins "Building Number 10", I'd have been foolish to expect a tree-lined driveway and Napa-style visitor centre, but pulling up outside the metal shed on the outskirts of Cromwell, I still can't help but feel a little deflated. It appears the star of blockbusters such as Jurassic Park and Dead Calm is fermenting his pinot noir grapes on the same plot of land as Ron Tiki's Worm Worx and Triple-A Tuff Plumbing Services.

I have come to the Central Otago Wine Company, a no-frills contract wine-making facility used by Neill and six other wineries in the world's most southerly wine region, to try to sneak in a taste of his latest vintage before our appointed lunchtime meeting the following day. Unfortunately, the man behind the Two Paddocks label has sniffed out my cunning plan and clearly has other ideas.

"I'm very sorry, but Sam doesn't want you to taste his new wines yet," says the winery manager, Bridget Wolter, explaining politely that, despite forwarding my email request, the necessary green light has not been given by the boss. "How about the 1999?" I try optimistically. A rather embarrassed shake of the head comes back (embarrassed because she knows it has taken me more than 27 hours of flying and a two-hour drive to get here) and only some persistent, "go on, I won't tell anyone"-type grovelling secures the reluctant uncorking of a bottle of the 1998.

A wine producer not wanting to show his wines is a bit like a film distributor not allowing the critics to see a new film before its release. It suggests the owner is either being unnecessarily over-protective or simply trying to hide a turkey from the vultures. Pouring myself a glass, I check the colour is suitably bright and pinot-ishly pale (it is) and then give it the obligatory sniff-and-swirl treatment. It seems a bit on the quiet-and-shy side ("sulky" is what Neill later calls it), but the style is classic Kiwi pinot; more cherry and plum than funky and feral in the sniff department and plenty of cool climate acidity in the mouth. I give it 15 out of 20 and make a note that it needs to be tasted again when the wine is a bit older and the taster less tired.

The light is starting to fade and, as I'm spitting out the last of the rival pinot noirs into a bucket, Wolter returns and asks me whether I have time to drop in at Sam's house for a drink. Coming from someone who famously guards his privacy, the invitation takes me a bit by surprise, but after a brief pause to weigh up the other options (another evening with my travel companion, Oz Clarke, discussing the finer points of Gillingham's midfield), I gratefully accept the offer.

For half an hour, I tail Wolter's car through the hills around Queenstown, at a speed that seems designed to make it impossible to remember the route, and eventually we pull up outside a stunning Ian Athfield-designed pad on a hilltop overlooking the Wakatipu basin. A casually dressed Neill comes out to meet us, and it suddenly occurs to me that my teeth are stained red and in my hand is a half-drunk, shaken-up bottle of the host's own wine.

Neill has just flown in from the US, having spent five days promoting his new film, The Dish, and a vast jumble of unpacked bags in the hallway are proof that alarms have only just been turned off.

He apologises for not being able to offer dinner - his Japanese wife would have cooked up something incredible, he says, but she's in Rome working with the director Martin Scorsese - and, after saying goodbye to his daughter's nanny, we move into a living-room that looks as if it hasn't been used for months. A large model of a local steamboat sits above a mantelpiece engraved with a long, narrow fish of some variety.

Neill talks slowly and carefully, with the sort of long, thoughtful pauses that leave you in conversational limbo, not knowing whether he's still in mid-flow or waiting for you to comment. The anti-journalist guard is definitely up, but gradually a bone-dry wit begins to poke through the surface.

After about an hour spent dissecting British politics and the environmental effects on New Zealand of a possum population explosion, I realise that celebrity wine-making is not on tonight's discussion list and, with Neill practically falling asleep in his chair, I make my excuses to leave. "Come out and see the view before you go," he says, leading me out past a large, Oriental-looking water feature and on to a lawn with a David Lean backdrop.

There, in the gloaming of a low-latitude midsummer evening, is the sort of view that would make Conde Nast Traveller picture editors drool over their light boxes. Down below, long fingers of shadow are spilling across the Cardrona Valley, while, straight ahead, the jagged Remarkables mountain range rears like a schist-edged saw across an IMAX sky. It is this extraordinary display of natural beauty that Neill rushes back to every time he finishes a film project and it is this humbling, unspoilt landscape that he is fighting to protect.

In a very public spat with the mayor of Queenstown, Neill has broken his normal media silence to voice his opinions on the potential ecological damage of excessive tourism and unplanned development in the area. As the debate has intensified and the insults have turned increasingly personal, the Kiwi actor has unwittingly become something of a local hero, with residents even setting up a website (samneill4mayor.com) to support their famous neighbour's campaign. "Sam Neill - we need your help!" shouts the headline on the first page. "We need a voice, and at the moment, yours is being heard loud and clear."

At lunch the next day, I half-expect the diners to start applauding their reluctant hero, but barely a head turns when we walk into the Post Office Bistro in the tiny old mining town of Clyde. Not even the young waitress seems to take any notice of what must be her most famous customer in, well, ever. Apart from being a good distance from Queenstown (and Mayor Cooper), the restaurant Neill has chosen is ideally placed just 10 minutes from the real subject of our discussion - his vineyards.

With plates of meat pies and chips in front of us (Sam's recommendation) and a bottle of that elusive 1999 Pinot Noir at last uncorked, I begin by asking why he wouldn't let me taste his wines the day before. "I learnt the hard way what it's like to have your wines judged by the press," he answers.

"A couple of years ago, there was a bunch of wine critics in the area and we all took our wines along, and I was completely appalled at the quality of my own wine. There is something very odd about Two Paddocks. After being bottled, it goes into a terrible sulk and doesn't like to be seen. Anyway, I was really irritated that I'd been talked into taking it along, and from then on, I vowed never to look at my wine too early. It's like showing a rough cut of a movie. It's not the same thing you will see in the cinema."

Talking about the day job, how does the new career compare to running around with computer-generated dinosaurs? "It's become more ambitious than I anticipated," laughs Neill, who modestly sees the development of his new wine project as being as accidental as his acting success. "When I started in films, it never really occurred to me that I could make a career out of acting and when I started planting vines, I didn't envisage anyone would be drinking it but my wife and me. I had planned on making only a couple of hundred cases of something drinkable, and no one was more surprised than I when we opened up that first bottle and thought: 'Hey, this is pretty good.' "

Although born in Northern Ireland, Neill spent most of his childhood in Dunedin - the New Zealand town where his family had been based since 1860 - and his introduction to wine came early. His great-grandfather arrived in New Zealand just three years before the gold rush started and having specialised in importing wines and spirits, the family company, Neill & Co, grew fast off the back of a thirsty, newly wealthy population. "As kids, we grew up with wine around us, and I remember every time we came up to Queenstown for holidays, my father would say, 'I've no idea why people don't make wine here,' and of course, he was right."

Despite the nomadic life that comes with his job - he's just finished filming Jurassic Park 3 on Hawaii - Neill's heart has always remained in New Zealand, and it was his close friendship with wine pioneer Rolfe Mills that led him to put down some real roots in the land. Mills, who died last year, put Central Otago on the map when, in 1976, he began planting vines on his Rippon Estate, next to Lake Wanaka. Most of the local sheep farmers thought he was mad to throw away good grazing land, but with its warm, dry summers and cool nights, the area proved ideal for grape growing.

Today, there are more than 39 licensed winemakers crushing more than 1,000 tons of fruit every year, and although considered to be right at the margins of viable viticulture, Central Otago makes some of the most highly-revered pinot noirs in the country. Names such as Felton Road, Chard Farm and Rippon Estate have risen to the top of the collectors' shopping list, and in the case of Felton Road, renowned critic Robert Parker has even suggested that it is good enough to be used as a ringer in a tasting of top Burgundies. This is as much praise for the region as it is for the winery in question.

"Rolfe was an inspiration to us all, and it was tasting his early Pinot Noirs that persuaded me to start something," says Neill.

He bought his first plot of vines in 1993 in what was originally intended to be a partnership with his friend Roger Donaldson, director of the new Cuban missile crisis film, Thirteen Days. "We each had a paddock of vines in the Gibbston Valley and so Two Paddocks seemed like the logical name," says Neill. Unfortunately, Donaldson's vineyard was mistakenly planted with Chardonnay and, faced with a three-year wait for the replanted pinot vines to mature, Neill decided to go it alone. The name, however, remained.

Not wanting to build his own winery, Neill was casting around trying to find a site to make his wine when he was approached by Bridget Wolter. She and her husband Mike were were then working as Neill's gardeners, but had plans to set up a winery where local growers could make their wine without having to buy all their own equipment. Neill liked the idea and in partnership with the Wolters, the Central Otago Wine Company was born. Everything had slotted smoothly into place, and by the middle of 1997, Neill had a good first crop of pinot noir harvested and a promising young wine sitting in the tanks.

But then came an unexpected tragedy. Taking a sample of wine from a tank filled with a protective blanket of carbon dioxide, Mike Wolter was hit by the gas and it seems his natural reaction to back off sharply caused him to bang his head on the tank door. He was knocked unconscious and the combined effects of the fall and the gas killed him. "I got the news about Mike's death in a hotel in Auckland and I was unable to speak for an hour," remembers Neill, suddenly looking as drained of energy as he had been the night before.

"We were completely bereft," he continues. "None of us knew whether we should carry on." I ask him whether he ever considered giving up the wine-making project and, after a long, uncomfortable pause that makes me think I've taken the delicate subject a question too far, he suddenly nods and answers as if admitting it for the first time. "Yes, yes I did. I thought I'd just sell up and get out. It was way too much."

Having talked to other winemakers in the region, it is clear that this sad loss had a profound effect on what is, despite its scattered nature, a very tight-knit wine-making community. Neill confirms this fact and talks with great affection about the fellowship of wine he has become a part of. "The great thing about the wine industry down here is that we are all competing, but we also look out for each other. I think the isolation from the rest of the country and from each other has brought us together more than other wine regions," says Neill.

We finish lunch and head off in Neill's four-wheel drive Jeep to check out his two new vineyards. On the way, I ask him about his passion for pinot noir and whether he thinks this remote corner of New Zealand could eventually be its favourite home outside Burgundy. "I love the fact that you can't tell pinot noir what to do; it has to express itself," he says. "And it's always just beyond your grasp. If you do manage to get a hold of it, it's only for a fleeting moment," he says. He believes it is still too early to predict whether Central Otago will fulfil its promise. "It's like watching a photograph develop: I think it's going to be a great picture, but we're still waiting for the full image."

We arrive at Redbank vineyard, a former Government Research Station, whose meteorological records show it to be one of the hottest places in Central Otago. "Our grapes here are about four weeks ahead of Gibbston Valley," says Neill. Our photographer attempts to take some actor-among-vines snaps, but his camera temporarily decides to take a siesta on the grounds of the sun being almost retina-searingly bright. "I have this effect on all cameras and film equipment - point something at me and I guarantee it will break," laughs Neill.

Last stop is a vineyard called Alex Paddocks, a stunning hilltop plot of pinot noir surrounded by weird-looking, wind-eroded outcrops of schist. Down below on the flat valley floor sit giant mounds of gold-mining tailings, an ugly memorial to those Victorian speculators, whose dreams of an easy fortune evaporated in years of toil. To our left, you can still see the ruins of the appropriately named Last Chance watercourse, winding around the contours of the land. Over a century ago, men staked their future on this land's mineral riches. Today, a new set of pioneers is pinning its hopes on that elusive quality that the French call terroir. They will take just as much hard work, investment and patience as their Victorian predecessors, but at least this time, there should be a guaranteed reward every year.

"I'm really excited about what could happen here," says Neill, admitting that this will be the first vintage he has been at home for.

The locals might want him as their leader but, with two new vineyards to look after and a BBC series in the pipeline, the chances of him running for Mayor are for the moment looking pretty slim.