| Summer Wine Dun Dexters – |  |
The Summer Wine Stud
The Summer Wine Stud
To introduce ourselves, we’re Michael Trotter and Beverley McCulloch, a couple of retired scientists, with a special interest in the conservation of rare livestock breeds. 
After half a lifetime in a Museum, working with historic objects indoors – we are now enjoying preserving historic animals outdoors – not all that much different really!!
We established our Summer Wine rare breeds stud at Tuahiwi in 1997. It is a smallholding comprising some four-and-a-half hectares (ten acres) of rather nice, easily managed, pasture land in North Canterbury, in the South Island of New Zealand.
(If you don’t know where New Zealand is, it’s a small self-governing country in the South Pacific, lying on the eastern side of the Tasman sea nearly 2000 kilometres (1200 miles) south-east of Australia – we’ve marked it clearly on the accompanying map.)
(And no, we are not part of Australia – we’re the place they made Lord of the Rings.)
Besides our Dun Dexters, we have a few sheep, some Arapawa goats, Buff Orpington chooks, an assortment of bantams, ducks, a dog or two and a farm cat. (Until recently we also ran a small stud flock of Dorset Horn sheep, but this has now been dispersed to Ashburton, Palmerston North and elsewhere.)
We also throw in a lot of writing and editing, scads of computer and website work, a spot of playing the Celtic harp, and a tad or two of archaeological consulting – just to keep our hand in. In our spare time we read.
Did we start by saying retired?!!
[By the way, our Summer Wine emblem (as featured at top right on all these pages) is a representation of the prehistoric European cave painting of an Aurochs bull shown here at left. The Aurochs was the progenitor of all our Western breeds of cattle, and the Dexter was a direct descendant. It represents our twin interests in archaeology and historical livestock.]
[Sadly, Bev died of cancer in March 2006, and Summer Wine is currently continued by Michael.]
