Rich Pickings at a Feijoa Winery

Tracing 49 years of Lothlorien, from its orchard beginnings to its evolution into the only organic feijoa winery in the world.

From Detroit to Makarau

In August 1971, amidst the foment of civil rights, Vietnam War protests and the new push towards organic food, twenty-year-old Dale DeMeulemeester left his native Detroit, USA, headed for New Zealand. He was intent on setting up an organic fruit production unit.

He knew nothing about growing food but got work on orchards around Huapai in West Auckland. Chris Smalley, who was quite ill from the effects of the conventional sprays he’d been using, owned one of these apple orchards. When Dale and his partner found the 41 hectares that became Lothlorien at Makarau near Warkworth, Chris helped them work out how to grow organically.

Lothlorien was named after Tolkien’s woodland faerie realm, but the land was fenced bare pasture with a few pines and macrocarpas when they moved onto it in 1972. Over the period of a year, eleven friends who’d shared the organic fruit production dream with Dale in Detroit gradually moved to Lothlorien. Initially peaches, nectarines, Poorman’s oranges (New Zealand grapefruit), and feijoas were planted.

Childhood peaches

By 1975 Lothlorien was selling their produce at nearby markets, and sold their often flawed-looking produce on roadsides. To encourage a sale they’d offer a peach through the car window. Once bitten, the peach sold itself, netting wide open surprise and the frequent comment: ‘I haven’t eaten a peach like that since I was a child’.

In Detroit the plan had been to produce ‘organic fruit for the people’, and in 1986 Lothlorien achieved BioGro organic certification (No. 062).

At around 20 years stone-fruit trees become commercially non-viable but Dale kept the peaches going for several more years, until weather conditions began to take their toll. The winter chilling hours needed to produce good fruit had reduced, and an increase in humidity made the peaches prone to brown rot. Pests became more prevalent. Lothlorien concentrated instead on their feijoa and Poorman’s orange crops, both producing in commercial quantities and requiring a lot of work.

A Team Effort

The original eleven companions all drifted away, but still keep in contact and visit. Most of Dale’s five children live independently on the property, and most work at Lothlorien, including son Eli, as general manager. Eli’s wife Kim, looks after marketing and communications, while his brother, Cy has a home on the property and is a financial partner in the winery. Their sister, Amaya, lives at Lothlorien with her son, and manages the labelling and boxing. Sister, Leah is raising three young children but helps with harvesting and juicing. Another sister, Sorella, is a horse trainer and also lives at Lothlorien.

Professional winemaker Justin Oliver ensures production is as perfect as it can be, and neighbour, Toni is employed part time to look after administration and dispatch. Dale is the orchardist.

Serious horticulture

Today Lothlorien has seven hectares of feijoas (1000 trees), and three hectares in Poorman’s orange. The oldest feijoa block is 40 years, but trees are planted regularly to counter losses through the root disease phytophthora.

A hundred pecan and macadamia trees planted 35 years ago are producing commercial quantities of nuts, although mechanical processing equipment needs to be sourced. Lothlorien also grows small non-commercial crops of custard apples, tropical guavas, cherimoyas, bananas, pears and a variety of other fruit, along with many exotic plants. These include a fish-tail palm, and three Chilean coconut palms (Jubaea chilensis), the world’s largest palm, gifted by Joe Polaischer from nearby Rainbow Valley Farm.

Propagating feijoas

Dale grows two trees of virtually every variety of feijoa available, but the vast majority of Lothlorien orchards are seed-grown.

“Once we made a batch from a single variety,” he says, “but the wine lacked the range of flavours and bouquets that it normally exhibits, so now we favour our own seed-grown fruit. When it’s seed-grown you don’t know which flowers have cross-pollinated, but across all the blocks we get a good range of robust flavours and bouquets – the whole gene pool – so we don’t bother growing specific varieties.”

He picks a few feijoas from high-yield, consistently good quality fruit-producing trees at the height of every season. His partner Jo Bradshaw cuts them up and separates out the 20–50 jelly-encased seeds, placing each one onto a piece of gridded paper. Once the seeds are thoroughly dry, she cuts the paper along the grid and pots the seeds with their bits of paper. Seedlings are planted out at two years old.

Each season Dale has Lothlorien’s soils tested and applies a remedial fertiliser designed by Tuturu Products based on the soil analysis.

Homemade feijoa wine

Supplying organic wine for the people wasn’t what Dale had in mind when he planted the feijoa blocks, but once they came into full production seven years after planting, he had to find ways to utilise the massive crop. They began experimenting with homebrewed feijoa wine.

Dale filled an outside bath with chopped feijoas, covered it and left it to ferment. In the morning it was uncovered and all the fruit mysteriously gone. The penny dropped when behind him an enormous belch from the house cow emitted the unmistakable odour of freshly juiced feijoas.

Having refined their process and excluded the cow, the family shared bottles of homebrewed wine with friends. They loved it. One bottle ended up with Annie Whittle on the Living Earth TV show and started an avalanche of people wanting supply, so in 1993 Lothlorien organised a licence and began to make wine commercially.

Scaling up to commercial wine production

They trialled the minimum requirement of four tonnes of fruit through a Kumeu winery. It was a success, the conclusion of which saw them purchase the plant from the winery and move it to Lothlorien.

Feijoa flowering season begins in December, and the fruit is harvested from April through late May. Only freshly ripe fruit is picked from the ground for wine production, never from the tree. Each block is harvested three times a week and, with blocks ripening simultaneously, the nine-person picking crew (mostly grandchildren), works hard.

Once the fruit is in, prompt processing is critical because feijoas have poor keeping qualities. The finished product is held in vats for bottling until two months before its anticipated requirement. Sulphites (acting as antioxidants) are added to retain the fresh fruit character of the wine long enough to enable the product to be bottled.

Balancing the flavour

Lothlorien feijoa wines are balanced with apple. Eli brings Bostock’s organic apples in because of their consistent flavour and supply. The overall effect is so pronouncedly feijoa that people sampling often exclaim: ‘it tastes like feijoa’.

“No other fruit is so discernible in a wine made from it,” says Dale. “It can be difficult to determine by taste from which fruit peach wines are made.”

Making the wine is simple, with the only trick being the precise ratio of apple to feijoa and skin to fruit. The skin is critical to the extraordinary flavour, “but you don’t want too much of it,” says Eli.

Initially Lothlorien fined their wines with organic milk from Dale’s house cow, but the recent rise of veganism has seen the fining agent switched to a pea protein, and they have achieved vegan certification.

“It takes more time,” says Eli, “but it’s worth it, and it’s great to have the vegan as well as the organic certification.”

Climate change grows pests

During the 70s Lothlorien saw good winter frosts with up to an inch of ice in troughs and on puddles, but Dale hasn’t seen ice in twenty years. What he has seen though is a proliferation of pests, insects and fungi.

Guava moth is a looming threat. They’ve caught the odd one in traps and are hyper-vigilant but haven’t seen any in fruit yet. Bronze beetle is another potential threat, particularly for young trees, but this pest is managed by keeping the orchard grass short. Lothlorien has so far been fortunate to evade myrtle rust, and serious invasions of leaf-rollers. The real problems have come with possums, ducks and, since 2019, kererū. Ducks are easily scared off with a few shots and constant walking through the orchards until they establish the habit of not landing there for lunch.

Dale sets traps every night for possums, and a friend regularly works the orchards at night with a gun.

Cellaring and sales

Lothlorien stores their wines in a cool dark underground cellar built into the side of a hill. The earth roof on top is at least six inches (about 15 cm) thick – some parts are much thicker. They built the cellar themselves from trees Dale planted many years ago. It includes the Feijoa Lounge where guests sample wines and from there tour the orchards and winery.

“We have a challenge with a different wine product, but also a benefit,” says Dale. “Once people try it, it’s fantastic to watch their faces open with delight. So-called ‘fruit wines’ are often eschewed by retailers, although some who initially said no have come back to us.”

Export is definitely on the blackboard for Lothlorien and some of their white label (wine rebranded by others) went to China, but export arrangements need to be scalable. A large export demand would require more fruit, which is possible, but seven years away from commercial-scale yields.

Looking ahead

As Dale gets older, the work of grubbing around each tree and other orchard activities has him considering his options. He would love someone who was able and willing to work physically hard to live and work at Lothlorien, learning orchard management from him, and eventually taking over.

The business is now solidly established, but Dale is happy for it to grow slowly. “I’d like to bring the pecans on and be selling them in glass jars ready to eat. There’s a huge market for them.”

Snips

Lothlorien Winery at a glance

• Location: Ahuroa Valley between Puhoi and Makarau
• Number of staff: 3.5 + 9 pickers in season
• Feijoa yield: 15–35 tonnes annually
• Wine production: 50,000 litres annual average
• Products: Sparkling wine, still wine, feijoa liqueur, Poorman’s orange juice, sold nationwide through supermarkets , organic and specialty shops
• Organic certification: BioGro NZ
• Vegan certification since 2018

Snaps

Enough for all?

What do you do when a protected bird starts finding your crop as tasty as you do?

Lothlorien is surrounded by native bush and kererū have always been around. During the fruiting season the guava trees bend like willows, so laden are they with overfull wood pigeons.

Until two years ago kererū contented themselves with guavas, but in 2019 they discovered the feijoas – which had always been there on the next tree – and gobbled them voraciously. In 2020 Dale counted more than fifty ‘fat-as’ kererū in just one block.

“We’re not allowed to harm kererū,” says Dale, “so they could become a huge problem.”

The kererū arrive at Lothlorien as the fruit begins to ripen – around mid March – and they stay for the season (about 10 weeks). During this time between 50 and 75 kererū feast in the orchard. Mostly they eat whole almost-ripe fruit off the tree, but they also peck ripe feijoas on the ground.

Currently Dale and Eli, who like seeing the kererū around, are weighing up their options, and keeping a keen eye on the flock. If the number remains static, perhaps the loss can be sustained.

Send Organic NZ your feedback 

Are kererū – or other protected species – eating your crops? How do you deal with this?

Please let us know what your situation is, and if possible any solutions that have worked for you – we’d love to share these with other readers. Email [email protected]

 

© Theresa Sjoquist

First published in Organic NZ magazine – May/Jun 2021 Vol.80 No.3