A love of flyfishing, a lot of thinking time travelling up and down the Hume Highway, brown trout and wine. These are factors that led to our On the Fly label.
After growing grapes for more than 20 years, we decided to produce our own wine. It all seemed quite logical - grow grapes, pick them, make wine, bottle it and sell the wine. There was just a small catch - what do we call the wine and what will we put on the label?
Richard and I bounced ideas around for some time but neither of us agreed with the others suggestions. Lots of driving between Canberra and Tumbarumba along the Hume Highway gave us thinking time, even some discussion time, but it looked like we had a stalemate situation.
During our trips, Richard was often thinking about how he could find time to indulge in his flyfishing passion. He dreamed of catching brown trout but time has always been of the essence - never enough to fit in all the things we wanted. He felt he was often doing things on the fly.
Then a brainwave came to him (obviously with my prompting though I think he has forgotten that part). Why not call our wine Mount Tumbarumba Vineyard (because we are at the foot of this mountain) On the Fly. This seemed very fitting given it's application to our lives.
It then seemed most appropriate to include a fish on our label. For some years, we have both admired the beautiful watercolours produced by Trevor Hawkins and included in many fly fishing books and magazines.
In a round about way, we bounced ideas off a graphic designer who worked with an image from Trevor's website and came up with a first draft of a label that we both really liked. When Richard contacted Trevor, he was very pleased to sell us the copyright to use the image even though he had sold the original. As luck would have it, the owner of the original lived nearby and was happy to sell it to us.
So Richard will tell you that the label is his brainwave. I have to give him credit for coming up with the name but would like to think that I influenced the materialisation of the label (at least just a little). After all, it wasn't one of those things that happened on the fly.