Wine Trials

Wine begins in the soil, says the innovative woman behind New Zealand’s first green tea antioxidant trials in wine.

Meet Erica Crawford, the innovative woman behind New Zealand’s first green tea antioxidant trials in wine at Loveblock Wine.

For a woman who forged a successful niche as a glamorous wine marketer, Erica Crawford’s career has taken a distinctly earthy turn. A degree in viticulture has allowed her to put her values into action, trialling the use of green tea as an antioxidant to replace the use of sulphur dioxide in winemaking.

The wine to benefit from this so far successful trial is Loveblock Sauvignon Blanc, which is produced by the company she co-founded with her winemaking husband, Kim Crawford.

“It’s a tremendous opportunity to live my values. A lot of people say it doesn’t really matter what we do to look after the earth, unless the big polluters start contributing to climate change, but unless we all make a change, then nothing happens,” says Crawford.

Sulphur dioxide is used routinely in winemaking to prevent oxidation. Levels used have dramatically dropped in wine production globally, but it remains a cause of concern, not only for those with allergies but also due to the fact that it is an introduced chemical compound. So, when Crawford heard about trials of rooibos tea tannins in winemaking in South Africa, she was keen to try her hand at something similar. Enter Loveblock green tea trials.

The project began in 2018 with sauvignon blanc and four years on, things are looking positive.

“The first thing we do is extract tannin from green tea and every time the grapes are exposed to oxygen (crushed, pressed, moved to tanks) they get a dose of this green tea tannin because it curbs antioxidant activity. When oxygen enters the wine, it randomly snatches oxygen electrons from other molecules so what the tannin does is to give back oxygen to other electrons.”

In other words, green tea tannins act as a free radical scavenger.

It’s early days and sauvignon blanc is the only wine so far to be treated to the antioxidant benefits of green tea tannins, but the wines are being deemed a success in terms of sensory evaluations, both in-house and externally by wine critics.

“We didn’t add enough in the first year and the wine was quite brown so we called the wine orange and then it clarified. Now we add five milligrams per litre so that each bottle has a small amount of green tea tannin,” explains Crawford.

Loveblock Wines is also producing a sauvignon blanc using sulphur dioxide so that contrasts can be made between the green tea version and the supposedly ‘normal’ one.

Crawford now spends some of her time living on the vineyard so that she can observe the vines closely because, as she says, “Everything starts with the soil. Our main message with the brand is that the wines are made with deep environmental care.”

She arrived in New Zealand in 1990 in her late 20s from South Africa and has remained here ever since. She and her husband began their first wine brand in 1996 when the couple had two babies (now 26 and 27) and sold it to Constellation Brands in 2006. Since then, the couple have developed their vineyard in Marlborough (100 hectares in the Awatere Valley) and Central Otago (10 hectares in Bendigo). They launched Loveblock Wines in 2014, the same year she started doing a post-graduate diploma in viticulture.

“It’s early days but the green tea trials have enriched my life because they have changed my outlook and shown there is potential in the use of a natural antioxidant in winemaking,” says Crawford.