Wine Photography Hawke's Bay: Bringing the Vineyard Into the Frame for AONZ Fine Wines
Most bottle shots look the same. Clean background, nice light, bottle centred. Technically fine, but they could be any wine from anywhere.
When AONZ Fine Wine asked me to shoot their range at Smith & Sheth in Havelock North, I wanted to avoid that trap. Doing wine photography in Hawke's Bay means working with wines that are deeply tied to a specific patch of land, the soil, the rock, the site all end up in the glass. It felt wrong to photograph it against a backdrop that could have been shot in a studio anywhere in the world.
So we did something a bit more hands on. For the hero images, we went and collected rock and stone from the actual vineyards each wine was grown in, then built the shots around that material directly. A wine from one site sat against stone from that site. It sounds like a small detail, but it changes the whole feel of the image. You are not looking at a bottle in a void, you are looking at a bottle in its own landscape, just scaled down onto a table.
Once the themed shots were done, we moved around Smith & Sheth itself for the rest of the day. Bottles on the bar, glasses being poured, the tasting moments that happen naturally when people are enjoying good wine in a good space. None of that was staged in the usual sense, it was more about being ready when it happened.
By the end of the day AONZ had a lot more than a set of product shots. They had a proper library, hero images with a real story behind them, lifestyle shots from the bar, and enough variety to keep their marketing, socials and packaging supplied for a good while without needing to come back for more.
This is the kind of brief I like best. Not "here is our bottle, make it look nice," but "help us show people where this actually comes from." That takes a bit more problem solving on the day, but it is worth it every time, and it is exactly the sort of wine photography Hawke's Bay wineries deserve when they want their imagery to actually mean something.
You can see the full set of images from the shoot in the AONZ Fine Wines case study.
If you are a winery, hospitality brand or producer in Hawke's Bay looking for imagery that says something real about who you are, get in touch.
