\u201cAs soon as the buds on the vine burst into life and we get those new shoots and new little leaves popping out, that means that we\u2019re at the mercy of frost. Frost is the enemy of vines down here \u2026 touch wood not too many frosts in our future.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two Paddocks has already lost most of this season\u2019s apricot crop.<\/p>\n
\u201cSam used to make his jam with them, and they\u2019re so delicious. And we unfortunately don\u2019t have frost protection on our apricots, and we\u2019ve lost about 80% of our crop. I\u2019m talking about four trees, so this is no national disaster, but we\u2019re all a bit miffed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Luckily she said they still have some \u201cSam jam lurking around in the cupboard\u201d made by the Jurassic Park star himself.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was very generous, as he was in all things. He would come home and love, love making jam. It was one of his hobbies.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sir Sam didn\u2019t want Two Paddocks using \u201cnasty\u201d sprays on its fruit, keeping production as organic as possible, Murphy said \u2013 which added to the challenges of dealing with the inevitable difficulties of producing good products.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is all about having very clever and experienced culturalists,\u201d Murphy said. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe farmers, these sort of culturalists, they often don\u2019t get as much glory but they work so hard and they\u2019re incredibly skilled at knowing how to actually produce grapes organically.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition to viticulture and jam, Sam also enjoyed looking after animals. In 2017, RNZ ran a headline \u201cLet\u2019s take a moment to appreciate Sam Neill\u2019s beautiful, perfect, pig-filled Twitter account\u201d, the story outlining his unconditional love for all kinds of animals.<\/p>\n
Last week, the Two Paddocks Instagram account posted a photo of pigs Brian and Amy, saying they were continuing to thrive in his absence.<\/p>\n
Amy\u2019s father was Anjelica, whom Sir Sam adopted a couple of decades ago and looked after for 18 years before Anjelica\u2019s passing in 2024.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey just became buddies, they were \u2026 Angelica was always pleased to see Sam and he would sort of go and sit with him in the paddock and they\u2019d sort of chat away,\u201d Murphy said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd look, if he put a post about that pig on Instagram it would get thousands and thousands of likes \u2026 If he put anything else on of course you\u2019d get a few likes, but you know, that pig was \u2013 he was Instagram gold.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before Neill took it over, the paddocks were a horticultural research farm, Murphy said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were all sorts of weird and wonderful botanicals being grown here, and stone fruit. A lot of plants were then grown to see if they had some commercial feasibility, so there\u2019s 38 different varieties of French and English and Italian lavender, for example, and echinacea and licorice root and all sorts of stone fruit and pip fruit \u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cSam bought it and he kept a whole lot of those botanicals and did a whole lot of planting himself, lots of shelter belts. His one comment was when he bought the farm, there were no indigenous trees, there were no native trees here. And there were no tuis no bellbirds, and no songbirds. So he sort of felt that another part of his legacy was sort of the thousands of native plantings that he\u2019s done here. And it\u2019s brought back the tuis and the bellbirds and the songbirds. So he was really, really delighted about that.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt made him so happy when he\u2019d walk around the farm. This very much was his special place, his retreat when he got back from, you know, those sort of very busy jobs that he was doing overseas.\u201d<\/p>\n
He even found time to spruce the place up with art he\u2019d picked up \u2013 not from the glitzy galleries you might expect a Hollywood star to frequent, but locals.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery time he was back, we\u2019d see him wander down to the clubhouse \u2026 he\u2019d have some paintings under his arm, and he\u2019d have a hammer, he would tinker away and put another little piece of art up or take something else away.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd often these weren\u2019t high-value pieces they were, you know, he had a really great eye. A local art valuer told us that he was good at sort of noticing young artists that were early-achieving artists, and getting in early.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo a lot of the art here isn\u2019t particularly high value, but it\u2019s got a story behind it and a reason why Sam was particularly interested in it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Currently the private paddock is open to \u201cesteemed members\u201d of the vineyard\u2019s Wine Club, but there are plans to open it up for others to enjoy, Murphy said.<\/p>\n
\u201cOver summer, we\u2019re looking at probably from December onwards, having some tours organised so that we can share Red Bank Farm and Vineyard and people can sort of see what Sam created here \u2026 more details to follow.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cAs soon as the buds on the vine burst into life and we get those new shoots and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":619067,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[156,8594,78,6176,6187,259980,111,139,1536,69,90,57913,18460,8485,1237],"class_list":["post-619066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-harvest","tag-in","tag-legacy","tag-lives","tag-neills","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-next","tag-nz","tag-on","tag-paddocks","tag-sam","tag-sir","tag-two"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=619066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619066\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/619067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=619066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=619066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=619066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}