A contracting company has been fined $52,500 for unlawfully quarrying in part of the important Gimblett Gravels wine-growing district in Hawke’s Bay, damaging the qualities of soil for viticulture.

The Gimblett Gravels are a designated wine-growing area west of Hastings made up of gravelly soils that were exposed after a huge flood on the Ngaruroro River in the 1860s.

Napier-based Wrightson Contracting Ltd was prosecuted by the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council after two complaints in 2020 that it was quarrying on a property in the district.

It was charged with using land in a manner not covered by a resource consent by carrying out unlawful quarrying, on a property which had previously been used for grazing sheep and an olive orchard.

The company pleaded guilty.

One of the complaints was made anonymously, and the second by a representative of the Gimblett Gravels Winegrowers Association.

In September 2020, council officers investigated and found a “large-scale” quarrying operation, including a hole 40 metres by 25m and up to 8m deep, along with sizeable stockpiles of dirt, silt, and gravel.

The company admitted it had extracted about 7160 square metres of gravel from the site over the previous two years, and back-filling of about 3600sqm had taken place.

About 6250sqm of material had been taken onto the property from various locations including Hawke’s Bay Regional Prison and Whakatu Coolstore.

A decision by Environment Court Judge Melinda Dickey said remediation of the site, a condition of a retrospective resource consent issued in 2021, had not yet been completed.

A report provided to the court said that gravel extraction had “destroyed the original layers of differently textured sands and gravels that create a special growing environment for viticulture”.

Complete remediation of the site was unlikely to be feasible.

“I find that the Gimblett Gravel soils that have been excavated and removed from this site are a finite resource,” Judge Dickey said.

“While the site has been and continues to be remediated, the soils will never return to their previous state,” she said.

“While grapes may be grown once more in the soils that are remediated, it is not known how successful that will be,” the judge said.

“I find that the offending has given rise to a serious adverse effect on the environment through the loss of the Gimblett Gravel soils and the location of quarrying.”

She described the company’s actions as “cavalier”.

Wrightson Contracting told the court that the environmental effect of its operation was low to moderate.

It acknowledged that the offending disturbed the Gimblett Gravel soil composition, but said the effects “are confined to the small portion of the property which has been disturbed”.

Judge Dickey fined Wrightson Contracting Ltd $52,500.

The maximum penalty available was a $600,000 fine and the regional council had sought $90,000.

In a separate decision, another company, Edwards Bros (Hawke’s Bay) Ltd, was discharged without conviction after it continued extracting gravel from the Ngaruroro River bed for four days after a resource consent expired.

Judge Dickey said a discharge was appropriate after hearing that the company had helped in clean-up work following Cyclone Gabrielle, and had paid $10,000 into the Hawke’s Bay Disaster Relief Fund.

Ric Stevens spent many years working for the former New Zealand Press Association news agency, including as a political reporter at Parliament, before holding senior positions at various daily newspapers. He joined NZME’s Open Justice team in 2022 and is based in Hawke’s Bay.