Te Mata Estate sits beneath the Te Mata Peak in Hawke’s Bay, a place where New Zealand wine history is unusually tangible. Founded in the 1890s, the estate is often described as the country’s oldest winery – yet that claim is frequently misunderstood.
New Zealand’s wine story has several legitimate “firsts,” depending on whether one is talking about vineyards, brands, sacramental wine, commercial sales, or exports. Te Mata’s place within that layered history is a precise and unique one; grounded in continuity, purpose, and place.
As wine writer Michael Cooper neatly summarised in The Wine Atlas of New Zealand, in Hawke’s Bay you can find “New Zealand’s oldest wine concern, the Mission, and at Te Mata Estate, New Zealand’s oldest operating winery.”
The reason for that distinction is that, from its beginnings, Te Mata was a modern winery as we typically know them today; commercial, selling onsite, open to the public, and making dry, European-style, wines. While that may be more common now, it was a very unusual wine enterprise in 1890s New Zealand.
From the outset Te Mata was a private, independent, family-run business, selling bottled wine to the general public. Bernard Chambers, the founder, modelled the estate on wineries he’d seen in France and California.
As detailed in Keith Stewart’s Te Mata: The First Hundred Years, buildings (dating from the 1870s) were repurposed for fine winemaking. The original vineyards, planted in the 1890s, still form the heart of the modern estate, and the winery continues to operate from those original vineyards buildings and on the same original site.
A unique wine operation in New Zealand, no part of the original winemaking operations has ever been moved.
This is why Te Mata is often framed as being the oldest operating winery, continuously producing and selling wine from the same land since 1896, at the foothills of Te Mata Peak.
Simply put, if you touch the walls of the stained glass cellar at Te Mata than you are standing where wine’s been made for the longest in New Zealand.
The early wine history in Hawke’s Bay was also more collaborative than competitive. Te Mata’s early vines were sourced from the Marist Brotherhood’s vineyards in Meanee, alongside plantings from the Beecham family near Waipukarau, and from Henry Tiffin’s estate in Taradale (a site that would two decades later become The Mission’s winemaking facility).
These shared beginnings speak to a small, interconnected wine community over 130 years ago.
Te Mata’s particular part in that story is of a dedicated, commercial, terroir-bound winery whose past and present remain inseparably linked. Due to the sustained focus on site and innovation, the experience making wine from the same vineyards for over a century, and the result of the last fifty years of technical investment, today the winery has both the oldest cellars in the country and the newest. A state-of-the-art red wine cuverie with the latest technology is now in use. Today that sits side by side with the brick and wood of New Zealand’s oldest barrel halls.
