When Darryl Soljan decided that owning a vineyard and becoming a winemaker was the career for him, no one in the family was surprised. For Darryl comes from a family of winemakers with great heritage in New Zealand. He's the fifth generation of his family to make wine and the fourth to do so in this country since his forebearers migrated from Yugoslavia.

And while Darryl had other ideas for his life when he left school, the family probably expected the passion of the vine would eventually take hold and he would return to the family trade. And indeed this was so.

Darryl was educated at Rutherford High in Auckland's west then spent a year in Philadelphia, USA, as an exchange student before returning to Auckland to study law at the University of Auckland. "I hated it," says Darryl, who dropped out of Uni to take up an Operations Manager position for a transport company. "That was a good job for a few years. Then I started to get more and more interested in wine and gravitated back towards what my family had been doing for years". And where better to start his vinous career than at Soljans Winery in Henderson, West Auckland owned by his father, Rex, and his uncle, Tony.

In 1994, not long after Darryl had started working at Soljans, his father decided he no longer wanted to be involved in the winery side of things and sold his share to his brother Tony. That left Darryl working for his uncle, which was fine except there was never going to be a great future.

It was at this point that Rex suggested to Darryl that he and his wife, Bridget, might be prepared to put a in lot of money and a lot of hard work and restart from scratch somewhere else. So that is what they did.

"What made you choose Matakana", I asked.

"There was already a slim track record of success," says Darryl explaining that he had spent a lot of time looking at different sites and data. "While it may not be the easiest environment to grow grapes with the humidity, Matakana has a lot of other things going for it as well as it being a beautiful place to live. We knew that if we planted the right varieties of vines on the right rootstock in the right places and managed them properly the rewards would be great despite the challenges."

And now, in 2001, he stands proudly in his winery tasting room in the building modelled on the San Luis Obispo Mission in southern California, looking out the window at the 4-hectares of vines on the hillside behind. "For the past 5 or 6 years I just sort of slogged, really. But now there are times, especially in the morning and evening when I am working up there that I stop and think that I am just so fortunate to be doing what I am doing. Sometimes I think 'this is just shitty tedious work' but there are other times when I think 'wow, to be able to do this, to make, well hopefully to make a living from it, is pretty awesome".

"Why did you call your vineyard 'Ascension", I asked.

"The vineyard is the most important thing about the whole place and being on a hillside we thought, well, each day we ascend up into the vines, so we just came up with Ascension in a biblical sort of aspect, given the style of the building as well."

Darryl has no formal vineyard or winemaking education, but being brought up at the family winery, and working there in all his school holidays for as long as he can remember, learning winery and viticultural practices became second nature. "My earliest memories are of wine, and that's not just crap to sound good. It really is. I remember looking over the top of vats and seeing things bubbling away and just being amazed by it and the smells - you know your sense of smell always seems to trigger memories and it does for me. But I'd always been around grapes and wine - even when I'm pruning, I don't remember where I learnt to prune. But I know how to prune."

While Darryl was creating his vineyard, he was also making wine at de Redcliffe winery, with winemaker Mark Compton. "Mark has been a huge influence on me in winemaking. A lot of the things I do now stem from Mark".

One highlight during this time was going to Oregon to work a vintage at King Estate. "It was a cellar position but it was a great experience and showed me new equipment and technology and techniques I hadn't seen before. They keep everything separate throughout the whole process, so it was a really good lesson in doing trials, trying different yeasts, trying different ferment temperatures. They could do three ferments of exactly the same grapes using different yeasts or methods, then assess them later on. It was very good".

Darryl, who is Vice President of the Auckland Grape Growers Association, has also managed a liquor outlet and taught wine education classes. He has done things right in my opinion with careful planning and enough patience to launch the winery when the vines were mature enough to produce a reasonable quantity of grapes. "The benefit of taking a long time to establish Ascension, also, is that we've had the benefit of thinking though anything you can think of. We thought about it and probably thought about 3 ways of doing it."

Soljans have always offered wines of good value and Darryl wants to continue the family tradition with the inaugural Ascension wines retailing for $15.95 and $18.95. Grapes from outside the region will be used when necessary, to satisfy the desired markets.

The Ascension Non Vintage Sparkling, a blend of 60% chardonnay and 40% pinot noir, has the fruit sourced from Marlborough but is the first sparkling wine to be produced by a Matakana winery. "I saw a gap in the market and especially for Matakana", says Darryl. It's a fruity, toasty, zesty wine with a good intensity of flavour and length.

The Ascension Chardonnay 2000, made from Matakana fruit, has fragrant, pear-drop aromas while pears, peaches and spicy oak fill the palate. It's a broad wine with good mouthfeel.

The Ascension Riesling 2000 made from Marlborough fruit is an off dry wine, full of lively lemon and lime fruit, gumdrops, sherbet and a touch of honey. With its gorgeous lingering flavours, this one will be popular in the summer.

The Ascension Pinotage 2000 is the first ever pinotage produced from Matakana fruit. It's vibrantly coloured with smoky, game meat aromas and soft cherry and plum flavours with cinnamon, cloves, savoury and a touch of sultry earthiness. (Link to my Wine of the Week review of this wine.)

Click here to read my Sep 2002 restaurant review of Ascension Restaurant.