Hohnen doesn’t just move through the wine world, he tears through it on a motorbike. Literally. In 1969, aged 20, he rode from Adelaide to Sydney, loaded his bike onto a P&O liner, and crossed the Pacific to California, petrol still sloshing in the tank. He landed in Fresno, a dusty, agricultural outpost in the Central Valley, where the local university offered five-acre student vineyards and a neglected teaching winery which hadn’t produced a drinkable drop in years. That changed when Hohnen got the keys.
Cloudy Bay, clear vision: the roundabout story of New Zealand’s most famous wine
