"Here’s to the next 7 years of keeping our story going..."

Have you ever wondered how buying wine from Naked actually impacts our winemakers’ lives?

Winemaker, Nina Stocker has been reflecting on her last 7 years as a Naked Winemaker - from the day she signed up, to the support Angels have shown in her shift to sustainable farming.

Read her post below 👇

"First off I’d like to wish you a Happy New Year from me, John and the kids in sunny Australia.

I was doing some mulling over New Year’s, as you do, about life, winemaking, the universe... but most of all about the journey we’ve come on with Naked over the last 7 years. How important you guys have become in our lives. And what the future holds.

Like so many good relationships, my introduction to Naked Wines was through mutual friends – Bill and Claudia Small and Sam Plunkett both encouraged me to put my hat in the ring at a time when Naked were looking for new winemakers. To be completely honest I couldn’t wrap my head around how the model worked – it sounded too good to be true, and so different to the usual route to market I had been used to in my career making wine for other companies, but knowing my friends had had only great experiences signing up I felt I was in good hands from the very beginning...and indeed I was!

John, my husband (and business partner!) was very supportive of our adventure too, he has always had such a great attitude to new business opportunities, and a real ‘have a crack’ (aussie slang for have a go), and his belief in my ability as a winemaker made me feel very excited about signing up to be a Naked winemaker.

In some ways it was great timing – we had moved back to Australia from New Zealand to start our family, and to take over our small family vineyard and farm, but in other ways I look back and can’t believe what a crazy time it has been between raising little kids and our new business all happening at once!

One of the absolute blessings has been the flexibility that we’ve been able to build into our business which wouldn’t be possible without the support Naked gives me. The model (with naked bearing the brunt of the distribution/logistics/financing/marketing element of a wine business) means I can focus on the winemaking, with the security of Naked’s forward commitment to volumes, and a reliable cash flow (so often the back breaking part of running a small business particularly during scaling up/growth period), and still be available to drop off and pick up the kids from school, which when you live on a farm a fair way from school is kind of essential! Of course like all parents it has been a juggle, and no doubt will continue to be a juggle, but it is one I get a lot of joy from, and feel extremely grateful to be able to do.

Our vineyard isn’t a mass-managed commercial one. It’s on a hilly landscape, and very low yielding, so everything has to be done by hand – you can’t get a machine harvester in there, in fact we are one of the few left around here where hand harvesting is the only option. Without Naked it really wouldn’t be viable because most wineries wouldn’t pay the prices it costs to produce grapes the old-fashioned way. So it’s nice to keep it all under our tender loving care and hand it over to you guys as a finished bottle of wine.

As we have grown, we’ve also started buying grapes from like-minded growers around our region and further afield, which has meant we can keep growing and evolving our wines and not get stuck in a rut.

Thanks to the support of Naked Angels, we have shifted to sustainable farming methods which include cover crops, compost, grazing management, and encouraging biodiversity. This approach to conservation farming has led to protection from erosion, improving water and nutrition retention, and ultimately growing outstanding grapes for our wines. We focus on responding and adapting to the natural environmental elements. For every environmental challenge, such as drought, bushfires and climate change, we return to simple, more land-nurturing farming methods.

Instead of seeing our vineyard as a single crop production, we view the farm as an entire living organism, with the fertility of the soil and plant biodiversity as important as the quality of the grapes.

It is a vision that we aim to scale with the support of Angels, to work more with like-minded growers to adopt regenerative practices while sustaining yields and surviving economically. It’s a win for nature and a win for wine lovers.

So thanks for all your support over the years. We couldn’t have achieved any of this without all you wonderful wine-loving Angels who’ve backed us all the way. Here’s to the next 7 years of keeping our story going, and paying you back with the best wines we can get into your hands.

Nina xx"