Every September, and for the last 58 years, a spirit of whimsy descends upon the otherwise no-nonsense town of Alexandra . . . in the following edited extract from Country Calendar, by Matt Philp, we journey to Central Otago and meet the Hinton family.
At the culmination of Alex's annual Blossom Festival, a grand procession of gaily decorated floats sweeps through the streets to herald the arrival of spring, a big moment for a region where stonefruit is king.
Its so utterly at odds with the reality of orcharding, which is as cut-throat as any primary export industry you can name. In the stonefruit game, crops will suddenly fall from favour and doors to markets slam shut. To survive, you have to be clever, innovative and relentlessly hard-working - all of which characterise the Hinton family, who have been orcharding here since 1912.
Howie Hinton, son of owners Nigel and Elisabeth Hinton and the fifth generation to take up the cudgels, says they can never stand still. ``Were constantly taking out things, and putting in new ones,'' he remarks, pointing out a block of young nectarine trees that have replaced some apricots at the Hintons' Earnscleugh property, across the Clutha River from Alexandra.
I'm visiting in mid-December, the start of the picking season. At its peak, there will be 250 workers in the Hintons' various orchards and the packing shed, and for several weeks the business will run at an exhausting pace. For now, however, there's just a skeleton crew of a dozen Vanuatuans taking a first pick of some rump apricot rows at the edge of the property.
Howie, who began helping out on the orchard at a very young age, stops the 4WD to check on progress and has a brief word with the foreman. There's a fair bit of pickable fruit left on the tree.
That first pick of apricots is difficult, he says.
``You'll see an apricot that looks ready, but then find the other side is still green. And the trees are all different. One will have nothing, and the next might have heaps. Its quite a specialised job, that first pick.''
When Country Calendar visited the Hintons back in 2006, it titled the episode ``Picking Winners'', a nod to the Hintons' success in anticipating the vicissitudes of the international market. Their soothsaying powers haven't necessarily been flawless, however: nashi pears, for example, turned out to be a fizzer. But for the most part, they've been savvy enough to keep their heads above water while others have gone under.
It's not just markets that can hurt you. The climate in the semi-arid Upper Clutha Valley is arguably New Zealand's most extreme, with the country's lowest average annual rainfall (340 millimetres) and temperatures ranging from a local summertime high of 37.2degC to a bitter -11.2degC in the depths of the harshest winter. Frosts are a constant menace, and unseasonable rains can devastate a crop in the blink of an eye.
At the Hintons' Earnscleugh orchard, most of the cherry trees are covered in netting ``rain jackets'', Howie calls them. Nevertheless, the prevailing mood on the eve of the picking season is nervousness. It's been incredibly dry here for months, but today there are dark clouds massing - although the unseasonably cool temperature could save the day if it does hose down.
A cold rain isn't going to be as bad as a humid rain: a cherry absorbs the rain easier when it's hot and humid, and then it cracks.
Howie grew up only vaguely conscious of this pressure on his parents, but very aware of the demands of work. ``We never went on holidays in summer, and we were always busy,'' he says. ``Even when I was very small, I used to make boxes for the fruit. And I never missed a summer of picking. When I went overseas, I always came home for the summer to help out.''
It was never set in stone that Howie would come back to the orchard fulltime. At Otago, he did a marketing and management degree; he could have taken a different track. ``But this is a family business, and I think it would be particularly sad for Dad if I wasn't involved. He likes the legacy.''
In the 1960s, the Women's Weekly ran an article about that Hinton orcharding legacy. Among the accompanying photographs is one showing three generations posed in an apple orchard. A teenaged Nigel Hinton, Howie's dad, sits on a ladder rung, smiling self-consciously at the camera, surrounded by uncles, aunts, his father and his grandmother.
I meet Nigel at the packhouse in Chicago St, Alexandra. Now in his late 60s, he's still slim - possibly because he hardly stands still. There's a focused, entrepreneurial quality that helps explain how he's not only managed to survive in orcharding, but to grow what was a small family operation into one of the largest family-owned businesses left in the industry.
This entrepreneurialism and orcharding goes back generations. Nigel's great-grandfather John Howard Hinton began with a jam factory and orchard in Dunedin, before buying the land at Blackman Rd, Earnscleugh. His son Bill Hinton, Nigel's grandfather, then developed one of the best orcharding operations in Central Otago. Nigel's father, William Howard, or Howie, took over in the 1950s.
Nigel was born nearby in Clyde and raised on the orchard. Later, he travelled through Europe, where he met Elisabeth. They married in Australia in 1969, and returned to Central Otago, where an opportunity had come up to buy an orchard in the Cromwell Gorge.
For Elisabeth, a Dutch city girl proficient in four languages, life in the gorge was a shock. ``Basically, Holland is flat,'' she says. ``To be stuck in the hills, with the sun going down at 3pm in the winter . . . well, I just had to cope. I couldn't jump on a plane.''
In her previous life she'd barely cooked, let alone preserved fruit or made jam. She'd never driven a car or gardened. ``I learned about fruit - I knew nothing.
``You learn as you go, really.''
Culture shock was compounded by natural disaster. In their first year, 1970, the supposedly frost-free gorge property was hit by a major September frost that destroyed their crop, along with most others in Central Otago. They were mortgaged to the hilt, with no option other than to try to make it work.
Elisabeth describes several years of desperately frugal living, with two young kids. ``You didn't go on holidays, you didn't buy anything, you made everything yourself, grew everything yourself and paid off the debt. Those were the days of 25% interest on loans. It was horrendous, and a lot of other people went under in those days.''
By the time they'd clawed their way out, there was another threat menacing the property.
When Elisabeth talks about the Clyde Dam it's clear these are hard memories. ``The Government's approach to orchardists whose properties would be flooded was ruthless. It was: `We can do this; we'll pick you off.' One or two didn't mind leaving, but for most of us it was a very difficult time. Of 11 orcharding families forced to relocate from the gorge, only the Hintons and one other have stayed in business.
Facing compulsory acquisition, the couple bought an 8ha property at Eureka Rd, Earnscleugh, where they built their own house and planted fruit trees. ``We had no choice about moving, but the gorge had been a better fruit-growing area, just excellent orcharding land now, all gone,'' says Elisabeth.
As Nigel's father and uncles bowed out of the business, he and Elisabeth bought most of the orcharding land at the family's Blackman Rd property. There they built a new packhouse and coolstores, and began redeveloping blocks.
At the start of the 1980s, most of Central Otago's orchards were still small to medium-sized family operations. But the arrival of corporate business changed the game. To survive, the Hintons were going to have to expand, whether they wanted to or not. They began acquiring neighbouring properties, a process that continues today - recently, they bought back their original Eureka Rd property.
``When my ancestors started out, the average holding was far smaller,'' says Nigel. You couldn't survive on that now. Whenever we had a bit of money we saved it, and when an opportunity to buy land came up, we took it.
``It was grow, or go under. When I came here there were a lot of smaller orchards,'' says Elisabeth.
``They've all gone and they're never coming back.
``There is no romance whatsoever.''
Recently, the couple invested in an expensive new cherry grader. Explains Elisabeth: ``In order to pay for that you have to have the product. Every truck, every forklift has to pay its way. The market says it wants X amount, and if you can't deliver, well, `Why would I bother with you?'.''
Adds Nigel, ``It is definitely still a family business, but we struggle something with the size it is.
``And there's all the red tape, the compliance - it's incredible.''
Against that, in 2016 for the first time they had enough volume to supply supermarkets directly without having to go through intermediaries. ``We can negotiate the price and all the terms directly, so that is one definite benefit of having scale.''
A truckload of cherries from Blackman Rd has arrived at the packhouse. Under banks of fluorescent lighting, several rows of workers stand at fast-moving conveyor belts, sorting the fruit. They're mostly women, almost exclusively Asian.
``If it wasn't for Asian workers in the packhouse and [Pacific Islanders] in the orchards, we wouldn't be able to run this business,'' says Nigel. You just don't see many Kiwis.''
Howie's wife, Sarah, who works with Elisabeth in the office, organises the seasonal staff. On this particular morning, 25 Vanuatuans are about to arrive any moment on a bus. Sarah has to sort out insurance and some spending money. There will be a lengthy induction process. Even after they're settled in their orcharding work, there will be follow-up training.
The Hintons' business is accredited under the Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme, which allows them to recruit overseas. ``At our peak we'll have 49 Vanuatuans here, who can provide a core base and give us some confidence,'' says Sarah.
Finding labour is a perennial concern for the industry; finding markets is another - the picking winners part.
``We used to supply a lot of peaches and nectarines into Asia and Australia,'' says Nigel. ``When that fell over, we cut a lot of those trees out. We used to sell apricots to the US, too.''
What happened? ``Twenty years ago New Zealand used to do a better job than anyone; now others have caught up,'' he says, citing in particular the Australian stonefruit industry and the Chileans. ``This business was preferred supplier to Coles Australia for 10 years, until the Australians got their act together.
``Now they buy Australian first. The Australians can't grow apricots like we can, so there's still a niche market there.''
How long the Hintons continue to export apricots is in question, however. They're required to use sprays for the hardline Australian market, but the Europeans don't want a bar of anything chemical. ``It's a real balancing act,'' says Nigel.
On the flipside, cherry exports have taken off in a big way, with most of the demand coming from Asia. The Hintons aren't alone in riding this wave: massive amounts of cherries are being planted near Cromwell, according to Elisabeth.
The Hintons send 70-80% of their cherries to Taiwan, which is prepared to pay a premium for New Zealand cherries. ``Demand is high. You can go to a wet market in Taiwan and not see any of our cherries at all; they're presold before they can even get there,'' says Nigel. If you do start seeing your fruit on the market, you ask, `What's gone wrong?'.''
As good a market as its proving, however, Nigel is keen to spread the risk. ``We can't just keep pumping cherries into Taiwan. We have to get a bigger share of the Chinese market.''
Again, Chile is the main competition, and is vastly better equipped for the mass export of cherries to Asia, says Elisabeth. ``Where we have to make our mark is in providing better quality. That's the only way we're going to survive, on the quality of looks, quality of taste.''
Hence the new cherry grader, a high-tech piece of kit that photographs the inside of the fruit and looks for defects, while also grading by size. Further down the line, the cherries get a second inspection by human eye and there are further spot checks later. Badly damaged fruit is rejected, while anything with a slight imperfection goes to the domestic market.
As a result, the fruit circulates through key parts of the packing sheds floating in water, to protect it from bruising and to regulate temperature.
The cherry boom is manna from heaven, but the Hintons have been around long enough not to take it for granted. ``If we got plum pox here, or Mediterranean fruit fly, or Queensland fruit fly, almost immediately the Taiwanese market would be out,'' says Elisabeth. ``It's entirely possible that in 10 years' time we'll be saying, `Well, we had a nice cherry time, but now it's over'.''
The answer is further diversification - only this time looking beyond horticulture. Back in 1999, the Hintons planted some of the steep north-facing slopes above the Blackman Rd orchard in grapes, mostly Pinot Noir.
Hinton Estate Vineyard is Howie's baby. Before he planted the vines he studied for an oenology and viticulture degree at Lincoln, then worked a vintage in California with Sarah. Several years on, the family have established a tasting room alongside the packhouse in Alex, and the wine is distributed in Melbourne and Sydney.
The wine operation pays its own way, but it's never going to compete with the orcharding. For Howie, who makes the wine, it's a labour of love.
``It adds interest,'' he says. ``The vineyard and the winemaking has some glamour appeal compared with fruit-growing. I get to put on a different hat for a while, work at getting the best out of a particular vintage. That's the exciting thing about it for me.''
More recently, the family has invested in dairying, buying a farm near Omakau, 20 minutes up the Alexandra-Ranfurly highway. It's an early-stage conversion, so they're still very much feeling their way.
``We had too many eggs in the one basket,'' says Nigel of the dairying move. ``As fruit-growers we can be hailed out, or frosted out, so that's why we've spread the risk. Also, I like cows! I like working with animals. And this opportunity came along.''
It's not a great moment to get into the dairying business, surely? ``It's difficult, but it's above break-even. And it must improve.''
You suspect they'll make it work. After all, they've survived decades in one of the toughest games in horticulture. And if it rains now during the picking season, well at least that's good news for the cows.
``We can't lose,'' says Elisabeth.
Country Calendar by Matt Philp, is published by Potton & Burton (RRP$59.99, available nationwide).
