Years of commuting 700km a week to her teaching job in Dunedin led Maria Barta Hinkley to reassess her life. Sally Rae finds out how her return to the good life has led to a thriving business.
Food miles - it's a buzz phrase.
It refers to the distance food travels from the grower to the consumer, but also highlights other impacts, including energy use, the effect on climate change and other social and economic factors.
Maria Barta Hinkley, of Inch Valley Preserves, near Palmerston, states with glee the distance her verjuice has travelled, before being dispatched to customers - about four metres from the crabapple tree to the kitchen.
From a small, commercial kitchen in a converted laundry at their charming, historic home on State Highway 85, Mrs Barta Hinkley and her husband, Jim, have been producing all manner of preserves, jellies, mustards, jams and spreads, and even biscotti since October 2008.
After years of travelling 700km a week commuting to work in Dunedin, -"up and down, up and down, in all weather" - sometimes leaving home at 7.15am and not returning until midnight, she now takes "a whole three steps" to get to work.
The Inch Valley property was originally bought as a holiday home, but the couple eventually sold their house in Dunedin and moved there permanently.
Mrs Barta Hinkley spent the last 11 years of her teaching career at St Hilda's Collegiate school, a job she loved, but she became "overloaded" by all the travel, and she gave up in December 2007.
Admitting to being an outgoing and gregarious person, blessed with high energy levels, she was then in quandary about what to do.
She could not see herself having an immaculate house and, while she would love to have an immaculate garden, she feared she would become quite isolated focusing on that.
"Who would I meet and converse with; how would I extend my world and life experience?"
Having been self-employed in the past, the food venture was "not stepping into the unknown" and there was also nothing like having had self-employed parents to give you a "launch pad", she said.
Mrs Barta Hinkley felt very fortunate to be a New Zealander, as her parents were refugees from Austria. Only 1000 refugees were accepted into New Zealand and "I just think it's amazing they accepted my parents".
Her father, an accomplished mountaineer and skier, met his bride on a rock-climbing course in Europe. They later established themselves in Dunedin and raised a family.
Mrs Barta Hinkley said her mother was an excellent cook and her own first qualification was in home science, while her husband also enjoyed cooking.
They had to install a commercial kitchen, but were fortunate they had the space to do that, and then work out what they were going to produce in it.
Inch Valley Preserves' range contains no artificial preservatives, flavourings or colourings. The business strategy is all about "being true to what you do so you can stand behind the label".
Mrs Barta Hinkley said she was appalled when she looked at the labels of some products on the shelves "which call themselves one name and [when you] look at what's been put into it, you think 'how dare they'.
Her dream is to use local produce and many ingredients are either sourced from their property or in the local area.
In their garden, the couple grow blackcurrants, redcurrants, gooseberries, plums, crabapples, rhubarb and nashi pears.
From the immediate district, they can source figs, additional currants and cherries, while apricots and tomatoes come from Central Otago and chillies from Kakanui. They receive calls from people offering their surplus fruit.
Mrs Barta Hinkley said she enjoyed making products "with a little bit of a twist", such as cherry Cointreau conserve, redcurrant jelly with port and blackcurrant jelly with kirsch, which used alcohol or alcoholic-based syrups as an ingredient.
The alcohol evaporated during cooking but left the flavour.
The business is a team effort, with Mrs Barta Hinkley describing her husband as "marvellous". She said she was grateful he did "all the boring jobs that I can't stand".
"Labelling is boring. Prepping fruit is boring," she said.
The one product over which he has full control is the verjuice, a lightly fermented rose-coloured liquid made from crabapples, which is milder than vinegar and more subtle than lemon juice.
"He's always there to do all the back-up. Sometimes I heed his advice; sometimes I don't and wish I had," Mrs Barta Hinkley said.
When it came to establishing the business, everything slotted together with the couple's individual talents and skills, along with those of their children.
"It's that old business about using the networks - a bit of 'what goes around comes around' - but mostly just building up a whole lot of networks."
When they started, they employed a neighbour to help, until their accountant said they could not keep doing that.
Back then, there were days when they wished the telephone would stop ringing, but it had not been like that recently, due to the recession.
The couple were in the gift market - they supplied a gift product rather than a food product, Mrs Barta Hinkley said.
They have stockists throughout the country, including department stores such as Arthur Barnett and Kirkcaldie and Stains. However, they lost all but one of their stockists in Christchurch, due to the Canterbury earthquakes.
They also sell their products online and at the Palmerston farmers market.
While still a "tiny" company, their plans for the future include continuing to grow their business in the domestic market.
Mrs Barta Hinkley said their biggest sellers included horseradish mustard with vermouth, lemon honey - "because it's truly beautifully lemony and a gorgeous colour, because we use free-range eggs" - lime and passionfruit honey, tomato kasundi, and pickled lemon slices.
Being an artisan producer, little machinery is involved.
The lemons for pickled lemon slices all had to be sliced by hand, as did the many trays of biscotti, Mrs Barta Hinkley said.
She agreed many people were now questioning what they were eating and they were "sick of things that don't taste as they should".
Mrs Barta Hinkley particularly enjoys recipe research - a large collection of preserving books is testimony to that - and trying out new ideas.
Sometimes, it was seven-days-a-week work - "my garden shows it" - and it was a big commitment, she said.
The Hinkleys live in a Central Otago climate, escaping easterlies and cold winds and with hot, dry summers and cold, dry winters. The garden flourishes with its river-loam soils.
The refurbishment of their delightful home, with its picture-postcard wisteria-covered porch, has been a labour of love.
It originally housed the manager of a nearby flour mill, which started production in 1877 and closed in 1939 when the government of the day brought in legislation that made the operation of small mills uneconomic.
Beyond their house is the old mill race that drove a vertical turbine, which, in turn, powered a dynamo. A second storey was added to the house in the 1930s.
"It's a lovely place to live," Mrs Barta Hinkley said.
