Ben McLauchlan grows Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris and Chardonnay at Rapaura in Marlborough and finishes beef on part of the same land. His grandfather bought Balvonie there in 1935 as a sheep and beef property; the land use changed, the family did not. He grew up on a sheep and beef farm in Marlborough and watched the wine industry spread across it, took a commerce degree at Canterbury and a postgraduate diploma in viticulture and oenology at Lincoln, then spent twenty years selling wine and beer. Mission Estate, Scottish and Newcastle in London, Villa Maria, then Lion, where he looked after the UK and European market. He came home in 2014 to commercial banking with BNZ and to the family business alongside it, and took the vineyard on full time in 2016.
Ben applied to Nuffield in 2019, having missed out the year before, proposing to study how viticulture could cut its reliance on scarce labour and fossil fuel by borrowing precision technology from other primary industries. Then he looked properly, and found the technology already existed. Nobody was using it. The blockage was not technical.
Ben’s report, Mindset of Change, published in March 2022, is about what the blockage actually is. Drawing on Carol Dweck’s distinction between fixed and growth mindsets, he argues New Zealand has moved through three economic eras, volume under regulation before 1984, then value after Rogernomics, and now values set by what consumers want and how they want it produced. The reason good ideas stall is that people decide emotionally and change when someone they trust shows them it works. He proposes a model for changing before a crisis forces it.
