S01E10: Jo Mills - Copywriter. The Outlet, Lake Wānaka

Jo Mills and I met up at The Outlet, the point where Lake Wānaka becomes Mata-Au / the Clutha River. Jo and her then-boyfriend Nick first lived together here, in a tiny crib that’s now part of the campground, and it’s where Nick proposed, in the kitchen of that cottage in 2005. They’ve since camped here with their kids, walked the dogs here, and Jo still points to this spot and that time as the moment she realised Wānaka was going to be her home.Jo Mills is a writer working across Central Otago and beyond. Whether that’s as publicist for the Wānaka Festival of Colour and the At The World’s Edge chamber music festival, doing comms for zero-waste social enterprise Wastebusters, writing copy for luxury real estate brands, editing multi-million-dollar EU tenders, or, on one memorable occasion, proofreading a dystopian novel of epic proportions.Jo’s mother was a publisher who retrained as a doctor, her father a hobby cook who traded his suit jacket for an apron every evening, and words, flavour, and healing would go on to become the holy trinity of her own adult life.But before any of that, there was a girl who grew up in West London creating “newspapers” on the family’s bubble-jet printer, went on to study English at Oxford University, became so captivated by the world of wine at a tasting in her final year, that she pivoted from English Literature and studied for and completed the first of her wine-related qualifications during her holidays at Oxford. In 2003, after carpet-bombing New Zealand vineyards with emails asking for work, Jo arrived in Central Otago on the strength of a recommendation from Marks & Spencer’s wine buyer Sam Harrop (there’s lots more to do here than in Marlborough) and an offer to introduce and connect her into the local industry from Central Otago wine-growing pioneer Alan Brady.What followed was fifteen years building Rippon, one of Central Otago’s founding wine estates, from a two-person office in her mother-in-law’s house into what it is today. Through brutal frost years, the GFC, a year in the Beaujolais, and a pandemic that very nearly broke it all. It was also fifteen years spent learning where the boundaries of a marriage end and those of a family business begin. When she finally stepped back from her role at Rippon in 2021, she registered her trading name The Write Path on the Monday and watched the country go into lockdown by the Wednesday - a fateful timing quinella that would repeat itself the following year, when her son Toby’s life-changing spinal injury occurred on the very day she was offered a job interview elsewhere.We cover the unique challenges of marrying into such a storied family business; what you learn about small-town Aotearoa when your family’s in crisis; the conceptual evolution of her understanding of land ownership; how she’s dealing with the threat to her work posed by AI; and why, over twenty years after arriving at The Outlet, Jo’s third act is opening, and those still, deep waters are really just starting to flow. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theunmakingpodcast.substack.com