Lois Mills & Family
Forces of Nature: Lois Mills
We had the privilege of shooting our summer campaign at the Wānaka home of Lois Mills, matriarch of the Rippon family vineyard.
It was a special moment; I had been fantasising about our W&D sheepskin in her 70’s Ashley Muir-designed home forever! I crush on Lois. She embodies what it means to be a self-sufficient woman with style. Frighteningly capable, sharp, and mesmerisingly chic, some may find Lois intimidating; I find her enthralling and magnetic. Her ideas tickle my fancy. I do believe the two of us would have been a force to be reckoned with in life and at parties in the 60’s.
Jo Mills, her daughter-in-law, is one of my besties. We had our babies at the same time, we have grown as mothers and as women together, and witnessed each other withstand moments when life throws all it can to test our backbone. Turns out we both have them and their knotty and strong AF.
Jo is simply a maestro with the pen, so I asked her to share in her own words what makes Lois such a force of nature.
Enjoy!
x Amanda
Written by Jo Mills
She’s a matriarch, a mother, a grandmother, a mother-in-law. She’s the woman who dresses every day as if she were going out for a Parisian soirée, not to be showy or make a point, just because this is who she is. She’s the woman who turned her husband’s dream into a fledgling and now mature business. She’s the woman who retired and went off to Belize to put her previous-life dental experience into practise with a voluntary service organisation. She’s the woman who, when other local farmers were building traditional homesteads, commissioned an ahead-of-its-time home built of rammed bricks and terracotta tiles. She’s the woman who spins wool and makes homespun jerseys for every member of her family (and families beyond that) and, while she’s the woman with a devil-may-care approach to life and no care for the conventional, she is a woman who cares for her people and her place a lot. A lot. She is Lolo – enigma, source of endless fascination, and the thread that weaves us all into the homespun fibre of our family fabric.
When Lolo and her husband, Rolfe, decided to plant a vineyard on the shores of Lake Wānaka, there was incredulity not just within the farming community but within the broader wine community. The 1970s was not a time of fine wines on the family table, nor was it believed that wine could grow this far south but they gave it a go, they worked bloody hard at it and, well, you only need to look at Central Otago’s reputation on the world stage to know that the rest is history.
This challenge to the norms not only embodies so much about Lois (Nick, her son, maintains that they must have been the first family in Wānaka to have an avocado, thanks to Lolo’s love of the new and the unfamiliar) but is also a trait that speaks to the value that she has instilled in her family and the people around her. She values people who’ll push themselves beyond their boundaries of comfort, she encourages others to do the same and she surrounds herself with those who are open to new ideas, challenges and who are ready to take on the apparently impossible.
Take the Wilson family, for example. Pioneers in Aotearoa’s deer industry, leaders in the world of sheepskin, and generations of strong women who will fight like hell for what they believe and who they love and speak up, loud and proud. (And, when they do, you listen, be it in poetry, around the dinner table or when advocating for what they believe in). It’s no wonder the two families were drawn to one another, why the family threads weave through the generations. There are godfathers and goddaughters, babies that lay side by side who now drum as teenagers side by side. There are the school friends who ski together, drink together and help one another with business challenges, and there the mothers, the imports, who have helped grow the family trees, drawn together initially by their spouses, but whose roots, soaked in champagne and tears of laughter, are inextricably entwined.
These are the people Lolo brings together, joining them as tightly as the wool that she spins in the window seat overlooking the farm that she has nurtured. Roots run deep with her: vines, family, friends. Inextricably connected and there for the long haul.
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