Celebrating its silver anniversary, New Zealand’s premier garden event, Garden Marlborough, has secured an exciting new naming sponsor.
Multi-award winning Marlborough winery Rapaura Springs saw a perfect opportunity to lend support to the popular regional event when organisers sought a new sponsor.
Showcasing Marlborough’s spectacular landscape and featuring a number of garden tours, social events and workshops, the garden event will be known as Rapaura Springs Garden Marlborough and run from the 8th to 11th of November 2018.
“We were thinking about ways in which we could give back to the community and saw this as a way to support a fantastic event, helping make sure that it’s an on-going success for Marlborough,” says Rapaura Springs director Brendan Neylon.
“The festival aligns perfectly with our company’s philosophy of appreciating what we have in our beautiful region and working in harmony with nature and water.”
Rapaura Springs Wines is owned and operated in Marlborough by John, Margaret and Brendan Neylon in partnership with Ian and Rosemary Wiffin.
Brendan says his parents, John and Margaret Neylon, spend many hours together maintaining their beautiful rural garden and Margaret has been a volunteer at the festival since its formation 25 years ago.
“Rosemary Wiffin has a keen eye for gardening having been a landscape architect, so Garden Marlborough proved to be a great fit with both families. Our wines will be poured throughout the event and for us, this is a great way to introduce our wines to a like-minded group of passionate gardeners.”
John and Margaret came to Marlborough from Southland in the 1970’s.
On arrival the couple were early pioneers in the green-lipped mussel business, and one of the first to vertically integrate the operation by growing, processing and exporting the shellfish.
John’s boyhood dream was to build a house by a body of water using stone from Central Otago and in the mid 80’s they sold their green-lipped mussel business.
Buying land in Rapaura the couple built their stone house and continued a life-long passion by developing a beautiful garden alongside the spring.
From small but steady beginnings Rapaura Springs wines has grown over the last 10 years from a single vineyard to five vineyards and a substantial modern winery in Spring Creek.
“We started out with a grapevine nursery, supplying many wine companies in the region during what was a busy expansion period for viticulture in Marlborough and then grafted the vines for our own vineyards.
“So everything has really started from that nursery in 2000. That was when we formed the partnership with the Wiffins, planting our first vineyard in 2002.”
Well known for its Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir wines, Brendan says the benchmark wine is the Rapaura Springs Reserve Sauvignon Blanc, which has won the Air New Zealand Wine Awards Trophy as the Best Commercial white wine in New Zealand and scored 95 points from NZ’s wine guru Bob Campbell MW four years running.
“The Rapaura Springs Garden Marlborough sponsorship is great timing for us. We’ve been winning major international awards—some of the biggest that you can win—over the last couple of years.
“We have great infrastructure and world class team making great wines and now it’s about supporting fantastic local events we care about while showcasing our wines here at home, in New Zealand”.
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Safety paramount for diverse company
The beautiful rural garden at Rapaura Springs will be the star of this year’s Garden Marlborough event.
