Gimblett’s neighbour steps up its game
Sunday 7 February
Hawke’s Bay producers based close to the Gimblett Gravels in ‘The Triangle’ are planning to group together to gain international recognition for their terroir.
While still embryonic, producers including Bridge Pa and Alpha Domus aim to form a ‘Triangle’ association to compete with their well-known neighbours Gimblett Gravels.
Paul Ham, Managing Director at Alpha Domus, said, “We are constantly bombarded with Gimblett Gravels. I’m not complaining about it but it’s up to us to be proactive. Across the road from the Gravels we have this triangle sub-region which offers something else.”
“People have heard all about Gimblett Gravels and they are looking for what’s next from Hawke’s Bay, so we have a great opportunity to get some traction,” he added.
The Triangle – also known as the Ngatarawa or Bridge Pa triangle – first needs to settle on one name for the area and define its boundaries. It lies around one kilometre from the Gimblett Gravels, on the same former river bed but with a clay and sandy top soil. The wines are similar in style to the Gravels but Stephen Daysh, director of Bridge Pa, claims, “The Triangle fruit isn’t as dense or heavy as Gimblett Gravels but is a little more lifted and perfumed.”
This is not the first time people have talked about defining the area but it has not yet come to fruition. It is likely to come against some opposition from other Hawke’s Bay producers and the regional association, which aims to promote the region as a whole. Let’s face it, most consumers don’t even where New Zealand is, let alone Hawke’s Bay! However, in the fine wine market the Gravels have already started to gain recognition and the producers shouldn’t just sit and watch while they run away with all the headlines.
Other vineyard owners in the Triangle include Ta Mata, Sileni, Matua and Church Road.
Sweet and sour Syrah
Sunday 31 January
One drop of rotundone is enough to make an Olympic size swimming pool smell peppery. One gram of this potent stuff could make the entire Australian Shiraz harvest smell peppery too. This compound was identified last year and was one of the more technical topics tackled at Hawke’s Bay’s Syrah symposium.
While there were a few tedious talks due to the bumbling nature of several speakers, it was an interesting day.
Tastings from around the world proved a point that New Zealand Syrah is pretty distinctive and can be picked from a line up of the rest of the world’s other Syrah producers. The Northern Rhone has its own unmistakeable style while South Africa can generally be picked for its burnt rubber/Stilton/gamey/call it what you will savoury notes. But New Zealand has its own New World version of the Rhone. It’s an elegant riper style with black pepper and ripe brambles, dusty firm tannins and a lovely freshness.
British speaker Tim Atkin MW published an article back in 2007 claiming ‘Syrah could save the day in Hawkes Bay’. He encouraged more planting of the variety three years ago but the call clearly fell on deaf ears as a mere 10 hectares have been planted across New Zealand since then! He stood up yesterday and told them the same story – to take Syrah more seriously.
If Sauvignon Blanc, which makes up more than 80% of New Zealand wine exports falls out of fashion in the same way that Australian Chardonnay did, New Zealand needs a plan B. Yes, it has other varieties planted but they’re a bit of a sideshow at the moment. New Zealand really has an opportunity to take the world by storm with Syrah. It could be as successful as its Pinot Noir. Let’s hope someone’s listening this time.
On another note, while I love some Australian Shirazes, there’s clearly a problem of over-acidifying. In a line-up of the top Shirazes in the country, the line-up was marred by sourness on the finish that I can only explain as overzealous acid additions. Think sucking on a lemon. Paringa Estate, Shaw & Smith and to some extent Clonakilla displayed this and they really need to rethink it.
The wines are clearly top quality with great concentration and texture but this sourness is not acceptable. Many New Zealand winemakers came up and agreed with me after I’d stuck my neck out at the seminar but I think it got some Australian backs up. What’s wrong with honesty?
Well it seems, honesty is a bad thing. I didn’t realize that this was a particularly sensitive issue in Australia at the moment after fellow English wine journo Andrew Jefford made a speech at the National Wine Centre in Adelaide in November about this and other things (click here to see the speech in full) He said “Misjudged acid addition is, for me, the defining fault of the Australian wine industry, and I regret the fact that it is rarely if ever viewed as a fault here. I’ve tasted hundreds of wines since my arrival here which I truly feel are defaced by acidity. Potentially fine wines which would, in other words, have been much, much better with much softer, less assertive levels of acidity. Lower acid levels would lead to flavour profiles of greater delicacy, expressivity and finesse, and a much subtler sensual appeal. One of the most frequent criticisms of Australian wine from both consumers and the international press is of homogeneity, and no single factor tends to reinforce this sense of sameiness more than acid adjustment as it’s currently practiced here.”
Guess I’m not alone.
New Zealand’s export hot shots
Wednesday 27 January
And the winner of the 2009 New Zealand export championship is…Sauvignon Blanc.
Yes, a whopping eight out of 10 bottles of wine leaving Kiwi ports are Sauvignon Blanc. Not altogether surprising you might think but its dominance is pretty worrying if an ‘Anything But Chardonnay’ backlash shifts to Sauvignon.
According to the latest figures from New Zealand Winegrowers, overall exports were up 34% to 130 million litres. It’s difficult to know how much of that increase can be attributed to bulk Sauvignon shipped out in flexitanks to be bottled as an anonymous supermarket brand but there would certainly be plenty of it. Unfortunately, there’s no value figures available yet so I’ll just have to speculate that value rises will be nowhere near the 30% mark. It’ll be interesting to see the year-on-year price per litre too.
On a more positive note, it appears the Kiwis have invaded China in the past 12 months. China didn’t even feature in the 2008 top ten export destinations and it is now sitting pretty in position number 5 with more than 1.2m litres shipped. With the Far East’s penchant for reds, Hawkes Bay and Central Otago are ideally positioned to take advantage of this market.
A Gris day
The other major mover in the export charts is Pinot Gris. Anyone visiting the country’s wine regions can’t fail to notice that most producers now have a Gris in their range. A surge in plantings has been followed by a 63% rise in exports in the past year to 2.4m litres. Winemakers tell you they hate making this rather neutral, low acid, high alcohol variety but people sure do like drinking it. It’s a pretty startling rise when you consider that as late as 2006 only 400,000 litres of Gris were exported. My GCSE maths tells me that’s a sixfold increase - Carol Vorderman has nothing on my numeracy skills.
It’s sad to see that Riesling hasn’t shared in the success of Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Gris. Exports have remained pretty stagnant and it’s had to watch a lesser variety (in my opinion) leapfrog over it. Booooooooo.
Anyway that’s enough numbers from me. I’m off to the much-anticipated Cabernet/Merlot forum and Syrah Symposium on Friday and Saturday. I’ll be posting blogs on the hot topics plus keeping you updated everyday at Pinot Noir 2010 in Wellington next week.
The hill debate continues
Thursday 14 January
Last month after visiting Waipara for the first time, I noticed that the vast majority of vines were planted on the flat gravel lands while there were plenty of hillsides sitting unplanted. Coming from a European viewpoint, I questioned whether there was lots of untapped potential.
This led to an interesting debate with Brian Bicknell of Marlborough’s Mahi wines. While vines in Europe are planted on slopes mainly to find less vigorous soils, achieve better drainage, and a better aspect to the sun, he commented: “the weird thing is that the situation here is nearly exactly opposite [to Europe] as the valley floors were rivers only a couple of hundred years ago so certainly in Marlborough, and I believe in Waipara, the free-draining soils are on the valley floors. The silts and clay soils in most cases are still on the hills so it is quite a different situation to that of Europe.”
I’d heard about a winery in Waipara, Pyramid Valley, 15 minutes drive west into the hills, that was planting on limestone slopes with excellent results, so I headed up there to see what their view is on this whole hill thing.
Mike Weersing, a Burgundy-trained Californian, and his partner Claudia, planted the two hectare vineyard in 2000, after searching Europe, California and New Zealand for a place to plant Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. “We wanted to add a new terroir to the world that could say something about the place via the grape,” he said. They found parcels of clay and limestone and there’s still plenty of virgin land on the property to be planted.
So what’s his take on the hill thing?
“Historically it’s been easier to plant on the flat and producers like the wines they are making enough, so they don’t have the incentive to plant up the hills,” he says.
“They would make more interesting wines and they would have one-hundredth of the water needs of the vines on the flat gravels” He says this because clays on the hills retain water better than free-draining gravel, adding “the country is going to deplete its water resources with so much irrigation. We don’t have to irrigate on the clay slopes.”
So, is it laziness and complacency that is to blame for people heading up into the hills? Well at the moment, there is very little planting due to the oversupply and recession. When the financial crisis finally draws to a close, will there be more people looking upwards? Yes, it’s going to be more expensive to work, so it would only be for premium players but there could be lots of new and interesting wines made.
In Hawkes Bay, the Glazebrook hills surround the main grape growing area – the Heretaunga plains. According to Rod Easthope, chair of the Gimblett Gravels Winegrowers Association, they offer some new good-looking terroirs for the local producers. “There’s potential all through the hills with limestone. It’s elevated so they don’t suffer frost. But they are always going to be an adjunct to what people are doing now,” he said.
In my next blog, more on Pyramid Valley and its unfined and unfiltered biodynamic wines.
Waitaki awakening
Sunday 3 January
On my tour of New Zealand’s wine regions, there have been a few wineries pulling out a surprise wine or two from Waitaki. Where the hell is that? Until I landed here a month ago, I’d never even heard of this region but from what I’ve since tasted, it is worth getting excited about. I’m planning on heading down there in the next few weeks to see what’s going on but here’s the latest.
Waitaki is in north Otago and is really pushing it in terms of viticultural possibility. A handful of growers have been attracted here in search of the next central Otago – a cool climate and the holy grail of soils: limestone. However, this region showed how susceptible it is to the elements in 2007 with a virtually non-existent crop. Cool weather and winds can ruin flowering and towards harvest, grapes can struggle to ripen.
The region’s pioneer, Howard Paterson, planted his first vines at the start of this century with John Forrest of Marlborough-based Forrest Wines making the first wine from the grapes - the 2003 Doctors Creek Pinot Noir. It’s still showing well six years later with a nose of peppery spice, Worcestershire sauce, smoked sausage and tarragon. For a first crop, it had real depth and lovely texture. Paterson sadly passed away before he could taste the fruits of his labour but he has left a legacy with around eight wineries now producing Waitaki wines and producer Pasquale opening the region’s first winery and cellar door at Kurow in November.
You’ll find surprisingly taut yet textured Pinot Gris; intense and bony Riesling; peppery and damson-ey Pinot Noir with a minerally almost chalky quality, plus Gewurz and Chardonnay.
Rod Easthope, winemaker at Craggy Range, which makes a few Waitaki stunners under the Otago Station label, says, “It’s ridiculously on the edge because in some years, we are not going to make any wine there.”
“They could be another Riesling/ Pinot Gris/Sauvignon Blanc region competing with the rest so I’ve suggested that each producer does an aromatic white blend not a varietal as the region’s USP.”
That’s a snapshot of Waitaki for you. More soon…