History

David Herd was a man with imagination. In 1854 he arrived in New Zealand and looked at the land he was farming. While everyone around him was looking around and thinking “sheep” he looked at it and thought “wine”. With this vision he became Marlborough’s founding winemaker. This is now a region famed throughout the world for it’s wine, but it was Herd who first saw that potential. He decided that the landscape, the soil and the weather were all perfect for wine. Herd conceived this dream of making wine on the Auntsfield Estate and planted his first grapes in 1873. He made wine here until his death in 1905 and his son-in-law continued his legacy until 1931. By then Auntsfield had made highly regarded wine for over 50 years.