Villa Maria premieres Vintage documentary

New Zealand winery Villa Maria has teamed up with American filmmaker Colin West to create a feature length documentary - Vintage - that tells a story of winemaking that has never been told before.

Vintage premiered in Australia at Sydney’s Golden Age Cinema this week and was followed by Melbourne and Brisbane premieres.

The documentary-style film, aptly named Vintage, follows Chief Winemaker Nick Picone, Marlborough Viticulturist Stu Dudley, Chief Viticulturist Ollie Powrie and Viticulture Cadet Jess Marston through Villa Maria’s 2019 harvest, capturing the process through their own unique lens.

Set in the windswept coastal vineyards of Marlborough and the sun-soaked landscape of Hawkes Bay, Vintage shows how they cope with unforeseen challenges, vastly varying climates, frost-filled early mornings and 24-hour days.

“For the first time ever in New Zealand, a winery is capturing the entire vintage process - it’s a peek behind the curtain of the all-consuming harvest period that we, as winemakers, live and breathe,” said Villa Maria’s Chief Winemaker, Nick Picone.

“Vintage is fast paced and chaotic - from sleepless nights and time away from our families through to the responsibility of making a lot of big decisions in a very short window of time. But at the end of the day, there’s a lot of passion that goes into every bottle. You couldn’t do what we do if you didn’t love it.”

The film will be distributed in 12 markets across the world including London, Dublin, New York, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Berlin, Amsterdam, Sofia, Moscow and Stockholm and will be available in Australia for free via Google Play, iTunes, SommTV and Vimeo On Demand from February 27, as well as on Air New Zealand’s Inflight Entertainment System from March.

See photos from the gorgeous Sydney premiere below:

Pictured main: The Villa Maria team at the Sydney premiere.