Pete Windrim
This master of reinvention seems to always land on his feet. It might be luck, or it might be a combination of his kind, generous nature and natural talent for business that’s seen him succeed in so many arenas.
INTERVIEW - Alice Armitage IMAGES - Trevor King
Pete likes to be on the go, it’s the first thing I nailed down about him. If he’s not working you’ll find him tearing something out of his garden or simply just running into the feeling that he should be out doing things. Learning this helped me understand all the twists and turns Pete has taken in his life. These days you’ll likely find Pete running his natural wine business, aptly named Natural Order Wine, but it seems Pete has lived many lives before this one. As an Art Director, Biodynamic Farmer, Restaurateur and he seems to see life through a lens most of us don’t often experience.
Pete can you tell me a little about how life began for you?
I grew up between the Hunter Valley and Sydney, my parents had a vineyard in the Hunter before I was born so some of my earliest memories are amongst the vines. Then my sisters and I went away to school in Sydney. The farm and the vineyard kind of remained a weekend fun thing for us. I went off into the world of advertising and started on a road to become an Art Director, loved it and it took me overseas. I’ve lived in England, America and India.
There seems to be a lot between working as an Art Director in the States to transitioning the family vineyard to a biodynamic winery. How did that transition happen for you?
It was when we were living in Bombay that I really started to allow things to unwind and unravel. My wife Nina and I had decided to make the move to India. To live a less stressful life and I think in a way I knew that my time in advertising was over, it was time to explore something else. The idea of biodynamics in relation to the work we were doing on the vineyard and on the farm kind of attached itself to me and I couldn’t let it go. I started reading every book I could find on biodynamics and farming. I was very green, very city and I could probably barely change a tire on a car. So the idea of going to work on a farm was just like taking on another language you know. It was all to me like learning hyroglifics. I think I must have read a book a week that year in India, I was not messing around.
Thinking back to when you were in Bombay, how much of your drive was inspiration for this opportunity to be making wines in a very biodynamic way versus feeling disillusioned by the work that you were doing?
I was definitely experiencing a fair bit of burn out when we made the decision to move to India. Back in the States when I was working as a Creative Director, working with a team of 40 under me, working 20 hours a day it really was just pure madness. The Managing Director would ring me on a Sunday at 7pm and tell me to get into the office in the next 30 minutes to fix issues. We worked with a lot of finance clients, and one day I thought I was changing the game by putting great electronic dance music to cartoon characters for a banking ad, but you’re not changing any game, you’re still selling a mortgage. I came home and ran a bath, got a long neck, turned the light off and just lay in the bath crying. When Nina asked if I was alright of course I answered with a very cheery ‘yeah!’ I was on that really intense treadmill. Earning big bucks, working with big clients and grueling hours but it comes with that almost martyr-esque badge of honor. Selling my inner city apartment to buy a bigger house and a better car, the treadmill just kept ramping up! That’s when India came up and Nina and I knew it was the move we needed. It detached me from that pattern, from that madness. I think it then allowed me to create freedom to explore other things I cared about. When I was in India, I was working in an Art Direction role that was easy. I dug deeper into biodynamics and I was just so excited and uplifted by the mastery of it all, but also the creativity of the wine making process. I wasn’t so fixated on science, for me the scientific aspect of it was easy to get my head around and then it left so much room for creative exploration. Historically so many have farmed or made wine by numbers, but it’s such a linear approach and removes the ability for the natural process to do its thing, and for the winemaker to just be the carer of the crate. It’s what I wanted to come back to, what I wanted my approach to be. I saw a tenderness in wine, in the practice of making it and consuming it and I just wanted to lean into that, which fostered my approach to making wine.
And then you headed back to Australia?
Yep, I enrolled in a winemaking degree back in Australia. I phoned up my parents, told them we were coming home and that I was coming to work on the vineyard. They were like, ‘ahhh no you’re not’, but my dad was quietly excited I think. He was 65 at the time, not knowing how much gusto he had left to put into the place. My sisters had no interest in taking over, so I said I was just going to start working for free, figuring stuff out and if it gets to a point where they felt like they wanted to pay me then that would be great. Thankfully they started paying me after about a month otherwise that plan really could have backfired! So I got into it pretty quickly, the learning curve was steep and fast. I would start making small batches of wine in this little shed after everyone else had gone home, and I was studying winemaking as well. I had a vineyard to play with and a winery to work in so I was very fortunate in that regard. I gave myself a walking start with the family business, but that also came with the pressure that if it didn’t work I would be fired. I went very very hard to make it work out, I didn’t want to be fired by my own family!
Then you somehow ended up managing the whole operation?
I did, we had our manager quit when I had been there for about two months. Up until then I would just go to the shed at 7am with the other guys and get my instructions for the day from said manager. When he left dad bumped me up to being the manager, which I was immensely under-qualified for! Dad would help me with a job list that I could brief the other staff on, there would be anywhere between three to six other people working there everyday. When they’d all leave for the night I’d get to work learning all the things I needed to know with the help of my trusty friend, YouTube. I learnt how to drive a bobcat, how to hook up the sprayer to the tractor, how to change a tire, and fire a shotgun. Every single thing. How to fix an electric fence, how to build a fence. Everything I taught myself in the evening after everyone had gone. So that the following morning when everyone had arrived I could more confidently give instructions. It was the definition of a baptism by fire and I did everything I could to hold my own.
When you started implementing Biodynamic principles into the operation of the farm and the vineyard how did the actual production change?
We used to have most of our wines made by a contract facility in the Hunter and made about 10% or less at the vineyard ourselves. Within a few years of me being home we’d bought it all back to the vineyard with 100% production on site. Which was really cool because it always rankled me, to do all this amazing biodynamic work, all this work on the ground to produce the best possible grapes, to then send all the fruit off to another facility to process the final product. It just felt a little disingenuous to me. It was great to be able to close that loop and bring it all back home.
When a story starts out, talking about a country kids’ move home to the farm, we all assume that staying on the farm is how the story will end, but that wasn’t the case for you.
My mum got sick, my dad’s attention was off the boil and when she finally passed he lost a lot of love for the place. It had been their work in progress that they had built together over a lifetime. We all came to a place where it felt like the right thing to do was to sell the vineyard. I couldn’t afford to buy it from my dad and it wasn’t something that I wanted handed to me because I wasn’t the only child to consider, which is a pretty common story with succession farming. So I spent the better part of the next year getting the place in ship shape, ready to be sold. But I knew as soon as the farm was ready to go on the market I needed to get out of there. I knew I couldn’t be there, trying to sell this thing that I was so connected to, that I’d invested so much
of myself into. Another very common struggle when it comes to secession as well! That’s when Nina and I decided to move to Byron. For the years we’d been on the farm the thing we were starved of was community. Around us there was an aging community and a lot of great people, don’t get me wrong but we didn’t have our kindred spirits there. I wanted to move on and meet new people. So we asked ourselves where the best community was, we’d been coming to Byron forever so it was the obvious answer for us.
It must have been incredibly hard to walk away from that. How did you even begin to think about what was next for you?
One day I just thought it might be nice to open a wine bar, so that’s what I did.
You then sold the wine bar in early 2020. Which is such a genius move, I just can’t stop thinking about it.
It really was the best thing to happen because if I didn’t sell when I did, no one would have bought it and it was never going to be something I wanted to do forever, it was a great branding exercise and really got me amongst the community. I did it for a red hot year, it was wicked fun, I had an absolute hoot but I wasn’t majorly invested in that space. Thankfully I had a buyer when I did. It’s funny we actually ended up selling the vineyard and the bar within a week of each other, and in a way it kind of felt like a gift. Not to get too woo woo on you, but it felt like a sign that it was time to really move on, to tackle the next big thing.
It’s a pretty incredible feat to successfully exit out of a business after just a year, it’s very impressive! How was Natural Order Wine born from there? I suppose it’s not that far removed from a wine bar at all really.
I met my now business partners Daniel and James through the wine bar. We’d spent so much time together in the bar, getting to know each other and just sharing a love for all the great things in life, good food, good wine and great people and with their backgrounds I just knew they were a good fit. They had an interest in wine, a year earlier they’d told me we should set up an online wine business and at the time I just didn’t have the head space. It came up again when we were all in the first waves of lock down, I was running around the shire delivering wine, I had something like $60,000 worth of stock that needed moving and everyone was just screaming out for it. I ended up selling all of that wine in those early days of lockdown, most likely very under priced but you live and you learn!
So how would you describe Natural Order Wine?
NOW is an online bottle shop and wine subscription service. We stock wines from all over Australia and have some international selections as well, but we’re predominantly focusing on the label of wines we’ve crafted ourselves. We launched the first subscription boxes in June 2020 and we’ve been interested in lots of opportunities for the direction we could take the business next and exploring how we can deliver a great product and a great experience for people. We’re really trying to craft a culture that will help to break down some of the barriers of how accessible wine should be for people. Wine shouldn’t be some rarefied thing, it should be enjoyable and fun and a product for us all to enjoy. Wine hasn’t always been this thing that’s been set only for the elite and I’m trying to help us come back to that. A place where wine and the sheer enjoyment of great wine is something for everyone. People want to know that the wine they’re drinking is being made the same way as the Cistercian monks were making it back in the day, it comes back to connection. Which always stems from something being enjoyable and approachable and memorable.
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To find Pete or to learn more about Natural Order Wine you’ll find them here.