Delicious food. When it came. I was almost ready to eat my hand by the time we got fed at the Air New Zealand Awards on Saturday night. 9 p.m and still no entree. I should have brought a sausage roll or bag of crisps in my handbag. It was a great event and opera singer, Aivale Cole’s, performance was spine tingling but was it a looooong night.
I have never been to a wine awards where the winners are allowed to make a speech. Is this a good idea? We know you want to thank your viticulturist, marketing team and Aunty Ethel but geez did they go on, and on. And the presenter, Petra somebody, a TV presenter so famous I’d never heard of her insisted on reading out all the tasting notes for the winning wines. Thanks, but we can read.
By the time dinner was finally finished, somewhere around midnight, I had lost my impetus. And my dancing shoes had walked off.
And the winner is
Anyway, now I’ve had a moan, Pinot Noir was the big winner of the night with 31 golds. For all the winners, click here.
And the champion trophy winner was also a Pinot Noir from Peregrine in Central Otago.
Steve Smith of Craggy Range and chair of judges, admitted: “There will no doubt be a bit of bleating about the 31 Pinot Noir gold winners.”
He then made a rousing speech on getting behind the fickle red variety: “I now wish to lay down the gauntlet to the evangelists who believe in our Pinot Noir,” he said.
“It’s time to throw off the shroud of conservatism. We should unite in our parochialism.”
“New Zealand Pinot Noir will take all the wines of New Zealand with it…and we must continue to invest in our most successful style - Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc.”
Smith urged his fellow Kiwi producers to take a bit of the Australian out of the Australians, and shout about how great New Zealand wine is rather than being so modest. And I have to agree. Less of the shrinking wallflower, please.
Don’t drink too much
Stuart Smith, chair of NZ Winegrowers, also made some interesting points at the start of the night, no doubt with the NZ government’s impending liquor reform on his mind - and making sure the wine industry didn’t get too pissed that night and embarrass itself.
“Up to 1961 it was illegal to serve wine and food together to preserve our moral fibre,” he began. “And it delivered some of the worst service standards in the world”. There may even have been a mention of New Zealand being the inspiration for Fawlty Towers.
“In 2011 our industry and our world class tourist industry will be under the microscope like never before when we host the Rugby World Cup.”
“We are all about being world class. It is always about quality not quantity,” he added.
“We need to be clear what we stand for. Responsible drinking is about good food, sociability and enjoyment. It is not about drunkenness.”
Still, there were probably some sore heads on Sunday morning and walking through Auckland city centre afterwards, it was clear that more needs to be done to tackle irresponsible drinking than a liquor reform.
The New Zealand wine industry has got its knickers in a twist over Jancis Robinson’s remarks about the country’s beloved Pinot Noir in a recent blind tasting.
She didn’t like them too much and was ‘disappointed’.
‘Bright and breezy, the wines were rarely subtle,’ she said, ‘even though there were representatives from the Kiwi Pinot aristocracy such as Ata Rangi, Dog Point, Fromm and Felton Road,’ she said in her column in the Financial Times.
The Kiwis aren’t too happy since they are trying to carve a niche for themselves as the New World’s best Pinot specialist. Oregon whipped New Zealand’s butt and it’s major news in New Zealand wine circles.
So, the timing of a blind tasting of New Zealand Pinot Noirs yesterday couldn’t have been better. Media, MW students, winemakers and sommeliers trooped down to a wet and windy Wellington to taste and rate Kiwi Pinots.
While there were a handful of crackers including (unsuprisingly) Ata Rangi, the Kiwi wines were all beaten by two Burgundies that they’d slipped in sneakily. In general, we were all rather underwhelmed by the standard despite some of the respected names like Seresin’s Sun & Moon, Bell Hill, Pyramid Valley, Neudorf Moutere Home Block and Felton Road’s Block 5 taking part. When you can’t see the bottles and there are no preconceptions, they were suddenly getting low marks.
Did we find much ‘terroir’? Well, the Central Otago flight (we didn’t know it was a Central flight at the time) was dark in colour but that was about all the sense of place I got. John Saker, Cuisine magazine’s wine writer claimed the ‘deep, dark fruit’ was ‘a true expression of what Central does effortlessly’ whereas others saw them as ego wines. The expression of winemaker seemed to be more obvious in the wines than any sense of ‘this is Marlborough, this is Martinborough’ and so on.
However, Larry McKenna, dubbed the ‘Prince of Pinot’ argued: ‘When we see what district is what then perhaps we can find a thread through each of the flights and I think there is enough comment to find that the last flight was Central Otago.’
He added: ‘There’s one more point to make that at the moment all New Zealand districts do varietal character in abundance but in 20, 30, 50 years’ time, you will see more presence of place than expression of varietal.’
But are we trying to find terroir too soon in New Zealand? It’s still relatively young and these things take time. In addition, when you think about Marlborough or Central Otago, these regions are enormous compared to say the Cote D’Or in Burgundy. There are different climates in different valleys, different soils, vine ages, different clones and no appellation laws to help make the wines seem more ‘Pommard’ like.
Personally, I’d like to see a lot of winemakers lay off the new French oak. Many wines don’t have the fruit content to handle all these new barrels. I don’t want a Pinot to taste of lime toast or coffee and I certainly don’t want it to look like a Merlot.
I’ll put some of my tasting notes up and marks up in the next blog with the wine revealed afterwards.
Cast your minds back to the start of the year. Yes, I know it’s difficult and some of us can’t remember what happened yesterday but you may recall a premium winemaking group lauching: The Specialist Winegrowers of New Zealand.
Sauvignon Blanc accounts for 80% of the wine that leaves Kiwi ports yet the Specialists didn’t have a Savvy in their portfolio, claiming there were few producers who specialised solely in the variety.
It’s also a price-sensitive variety, as Chris Canning of The Hay Paddock, told me in an article for decanter.com ‘Sauvignon Blanc is such a cut-throat market.’
‘There was a little prejudice toward the variety. We want to decouple ourselves from the New Zealand wine brand image that is slanted toward Sauvignon Blanc,’ he said back in January.
However, the group’s tune has changed - they have just announced Marlborough’s Fairbourne Estate will be the sixth member of the Specialists, dedicated to Sauvignon Blanc.
According to the press release, Fairbourne has been on the Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc scene since the early 1990’s. Embarrassingly, I have never visited them, tried their wines and heard very little about them, so I can’t tell you whether they are any good! I will endeavour to change that.
Fairbourne joins Waiheke-based The Hay Paddock and Destiny Bay; fizz producers No.1 Family Estate; Gewurztraminer specialists Vinoptima and, Wooing Tree from Central Otago.
Matt Dicey, winemaker at Mt Difficulty, introduces this episode of Unfiltered. He wriggles out of telling us his birth year and loves the Matrix…Keanu, you still have your fans!