a not serious guest writer — Oliver Hopkinson-Styles
Oliver Hopkinson-Styles, Olly to most of us, is one part of the two parts that make up Halcyon Days - the winery he and his wife, Amy own and work together. I first met Olly over a smashing dinner at Onslow by Josh Emett with Helen Masters and the good folks at Ata Rangi. The chat was mostly about writing and it made me wonder how this lovely guy from Blighty got into making wine and writing about it in the first place — and how that all led to him landing on the shores of Aotearoa. There’s a lot of strings to this geezer’s bow. A right swashbuckler, this swordsman has represented New Zealand at the Commonwealth Fencing Championships. He’s fluent in Spanish and French and on a committed journey to add te reo Māori to the lingual suite. In-between writing for meaty mags like Decanter, growing grapes and making wine, he and Amy still find time to be available in person, turning up to pour their wine whenever asked. How he does it, Lordy knows. How he started…well he explains that in this piece of work. We suspect this might be Part One of Olly’s story. Like any great writer, he’s certainly left us wanting to know what happened next. Enjoy!
Like everyone else in the wine industry, I got into it by taking the wrong turn in a middle class corridor.
In my teens, I'd wanted to be a journalist. At least, that's what I told people. This itself came from not knowing what I wanted to be when I grew up, and yet repeatedly being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up by adults and grandparents (which in itself comes from grown-ups not knowing how to talk to kids).
I had no response. But I had enjoyed reading Tintin when I was younger and Tintin was a reporter, so I told them I wanted to be a journalist. It got the wrinklies off my back – generally with a disappointed look.
So when I left university at 22 (and found myself stacking shelves in my local supermarket while having philosophy chats with other freshly minted graduates in the storeroom), I tried to get a job in journalism. As a result, I did a week's stint at Spectator when it was being edited by Boris Johnson – yes, that Boris Johnson. Politically, I was on the other end of the spectrum, but they had some good writers – I remember a piece from that time by Rod Liddle, I think, where the catch was that, although accused by his wife of having masturbated into her lingerie draw, he had to wrestle with whether or not to tell her it hadn't been him. In many ways, writing on the right hasn't changed much in 20 years.
Even Johnson could be a good writer, though, irrespective of your views on him and, well, what he wrote. And it was good to see how it all went together, from cartoons (they are tiny in print but massive in real life) to editorial planning to keeping contributors sweet to checking pdf and print proofs at the printers in a dilapidated building in North London. But unless you count getting a free tie from Holland & Holland and pointing a Baroness in the direction of a packet of Marlboro Lights one evening, nothing came of it.
The same can't be said for my stint at Decanter (also a five-day work experience gig that turned into six years) a little while later. There, I actually got to write. It was the younger days of the internet and, although the dot-com boom had been and gone, I'd joined the website team, which was headed by Adam Lechmere – a proper journalist, and we were churning out stories at the rate of three or four a day.
It quickly dispelled any notions that writing as a job was romantic. It's a craft, it takes work. Writing at school and university – perhaps writing generally – gets one used to bringing it all up on paper and then handing it in to get a mark. Or writing on the inside of a thank-you card and mailing it off. But writing as a craft is not that.
Nor is it Carrie Bradshaw finishing off her column with a glass of Pinot Gris and closing the laptop. If it was real life, her editor would phone up in the morning, asking her what she meant in paragraph three, sentence two; if she wouldn't mind reworking the introduction and asking her to expand on the end bit. Then, a sub-editor would correct a number of grammar mistakes, point out, for the hundredth time, that the style of the magazine was to write out "percent" and not use the % symbol, and move some commas around. The editor would change the headline – the original was too dull – and the get the thrust of the piece wrong on the strapline.
If anyone has seen the beautiful 1997 film Regeneration, specifically where Sigfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen work on Owen's poems, it's a bit more like that. Except it was Adam and myself, cigarettes in hand, on the steps of Fulham fire escape, Adam armed with a red Biro, attacking an A4 printout of my work. "What's the top line?" and "that's your opinion – no-one wants to hear your opinion" and "that paragraph's in the wrong place". It was rough, at first. It takes a long while to get used to your writing going through mill.
But Adam was a pro. He'd learned it all the hard way as a hack and at the BBC. Basically, I was trained on the job by the best feature writer in wine today.
It was as invaluable as learning to deal with the procession of pedants – sorry, "readers" – who line up to tell you where you made a mistake in your piece. I know, just as I know winemakers actually doing grunt work in the cellar are as mistake-prone as cellarhands, that people who spot mistakes in writing would be just as error-prone themselves. But them's the breaks: you break it, you wrote it.
Another thing I quickly learned was that, for all anyone's protestations to the contrary, wine is political. In fact, an illustration of this came with one of the first pieces I ever wrote: about the Golan Heights Winery. Someone wrote in to complain and to point out that the Golan Heights itself is not Israeli land. That night, I could barely sleep. My first real job and I had visions of being chucked out the door because I hadn't read the geopolitical fine-print. We punted the complaint out to our US correspondent (the late Howard G Goldberg, for those who might recognise his name) for his thoughts and although the complaint was well-founded, I hadn't actually stated in the piece that the land on which the vineyard was planted was Israeli.
I even remember having dinner at a Bordeaux château where the owner, matter-of-fact, pointed out that the Chinese government had done the right thing in repressing the Tianamen Square demonstrations (i.e. in massacring the protestors). I remember the PR woman's wide-eyes as this was said. It was a bit like the Antinoris saying that at least the trains ran on time under Mussolini. Even some of the older wine tasters back then were straight-out racist. Many still remain incredibly sexist. You might want your wine to be free of politics but it's not made that way, and I doubt it ever will be.
Another, more personal, revelation occurred some months into the job. At that time, I was living with a group of friends in a shared house in East London. One day, we were sitting in the lounge one evening, probably playing on the PS2 and drinking wine, when my good friend (also one of the housemates) soberly told us he'd filled out a safe drinking questionnaire at work and that, much to his surprise, he'd ticked nearly all the boxes. We checked them ourselves and, lo and behold, we all easily qualified as alcoholics. I would have been 23 or 24 at the time.
That sounds shocking but just that revelation, early on in my career in wine, was actually a gift – or more properly a touchstone. I didn't sort myself out for a good few years but that knowledge at least helped to remind me where edge of the field of play was, even when I transgressed. No one should be preached to and no one is free of vice, but anyone who works in this industry should (at the very outset) be handed some sort of safe-drinking questionnaire, even if they don't fill it in.
It was an amazing time for wine too. Decanter (initially) had competition on UK shores in the form of Wine International while on the internet, Wine Spectator was probably the major rival. Robert Parker was in his heyday; Mondovino and Sideways were released within short space of each other; wine competitions were beginning to grow and I had begun feature writing for the magazine and helping out with the editorial side of things. But like most people who work on the periphery of wine, I began to think about making it. For some, this dream doesn't last very long, but for me, I found that door open in front of me when I moved to Spain. But that's another story.
— Oliver Hopkinson-Styles
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