Picture it: It was 2021, and Anne Kirsch was in a mandatory two-week hotel quarantine in Auckland with an eight-month-old, a two-and-a-half-year-old, and her Kiwi husband, Tom. 

There was the pressure of parenting babies in isolation, in a new country, with no clear sense of what came next. Then Tom threw her a curveball. 

“Tom just one night in quarantine said, ‘I just bought some grapes. We’re going to make our own wine’,” Anne said. 

"I was like, ‘Really? That’s your concern right now?’"  

She agreed to invest, and that moment became the seed for 15 Minute Bottles, a low-intervention wine label run by four friends, split between Central Otago and Christchurch. 

Anne was born in 1985 in East Berlin, a detail that shaped her family’s outlook.  

Her parents, both diplomats, wanted something freer for their children.  

When Anne was three, they moved to Vienna, just as talk of the Berlin Wall coming down gathered momentum. 

“My spirit home is Vienna,” Anne said. 

She grew up surrounded by international classmates, spent a high school year in Montana, and at 18 became a flight attendant - a job she held for 15 years.  

Home became hotels and airports, but Vienna remained the base.  

While still flying, Anne began studying winemaking, and she met her future husband, Kiwi winemaker Tom, in Austria, working the harvest at a winery outside Vienna.  

They fell in love quickly, married in Austria in 2018, and started a family. 

Anne’s first experience of New Zealand came earlier, during a 2016 harvest in Cromwell.  

She liked it - the seasons, the landscape, the familiarity of countryside that reminded her of Austria - but she wasn’t swept away. 

“I wasn’t in love with New Zealand,” she said.  

“I was in love with Tom.” 

Upon moving here, it took time, she said, to stop comparing the two countries.  

“When I stopped that, I started to fall in love with New Zealand. It definitely wasn’t love at first sight.” 

At 15 Minute Bottles, Anne and Tom work with another couple - David and Lana - friends with ties back to Berlin and Austria.  

The name comes from blind tastings and an offhand comment from a colleague: a wine so “smashable” it’s gone in 15 minutes. 

“You don’t necessarily think too much about it,” Anne said.  

“It’s delicious, juicy - gone in 15 minutes.” 

The label’s test-pot design reflects the same idea: trial, opinion, conversation. Wine without reverence. Something shared as much as saved. 

Anne Kirsch at work in Central Otago. Image: Supplied

Alongside 15 Minute Bottles, Anne works at Cromwell winery Quartz Reef while building her own photography business. 

“I was always that annoying one with the camera,” she said, recalling friends surprising her with her first “good camera” for her 30th birthday.  

Still, it took years to give herself permission to treat photography as work. 

Moving to New Zealand helped. Away from family expectations, Anne began learning by doing - watching tutorials, listening to podcasts, and taking small jobs.  

“I’m doing this for me,” she said.  

“And I love doing it.” 

Her focus is on outdoor family sessions and weddings. 

What she enjoys most is the anticipation - driving to meet people she hasn’t met before - and then the surprise that comes later, while editing, when unnoticed moments emerge.  

“That’s magic,” she said. 

Last year, Anne and Tom bought a house in Cromwell, but the commitment hasn’t erased the tension she feels between city and country.  

She still feels drawn to urban life and sometimes worries about raising her daughters somewhere quiet. 

There’s also the weight that comes with building a life far from family.  

“There’s always guilt,” she said.  

“And the older you get, the harder it is.” 

For now, though, Central Otago feels safe - especially, she said, with everything happening elsewhere in the world.  

“Home is where we are,” she said.  

“As long as the four of us are together.”

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