New Zealand has held a Pinot workshop in the spa town of Hanmer for more than 20 years. Following Pinot 2010 in Wellington, Marlborough producers decided to set up their own workshop to get serious about this fickle grape.
While Hanmer has sumptuous hot pools, Marlborough producers hold their get-together at a school campground! Whoever thought it would be a good idea to hold wine tastings at a centre with an adventure playground was asking for trouble. I am reliably informed injuries have been sustained in the name of Marlborough Pinot Noir.
Ben Glover, winemaker at Wither Hills, says: “This is modelled on the Hanmer experience but we really need to encourage our own region to take Pinot seriously.”
Indeed, Marlborough Pinot Noir has an image as simple and juicy. Serious Pinot drinkers have looked to Martinborough or Central Otago for complex, structured Pinot Noir. But Marlborough producers aren’t content with the status quo.
Anna Flowerday, co-owner of Te Whare Ra, says: “Marlborough gets accused of being too fruity and not complex but that’s a vine age thing. Now we have really good clones and really good sites and that’s why I think Marlborough Pinot has improved.”
Certainly older vines and sites, particulary in the southern Wairau Valley such as Benmorvan and Clayvin vineyard, are showing promising results but this year’s campground convention concentrated on stems in Marlborough Pinot Noir.
Flowerday explains: “We have a whole day when people bring trial wines. This year everyone brought stem trials from the 2011 vintage. We did some really great flights with no stems, 20% stems vs 50%. We found some interesting stuff.”
“Some people swore blue murder that they would never used stems and now they are considering it,” she adds. “Stems is more of a finesse thing giving wines an extra layer. You get secondary characteristics. The stems give the palate width and a floral perfumed character.”
Across the road at Wither Hills, Glover has also been experimenting with grape stems. He was cautious at first, worried that stems would bring green flavours and astringency. Today, the winery’s standard Pinot generally has 5-12% stems in the ferment. He has also done barrel trials with up to 100% stems. “It was pretty cool. It really swung the pendulum, giving the wines white pepper, lifted notes…It kept the bright fruit at bay.”
While I personally love stems in my New Zealand Pinot Noir, providing structure and line to the soft fruit, it doesn’t always work. Let’s face it, no-one wants astringency in a Kiwi Pinot. Flowerday adds: “We need to do it very cautiously on younger vines because they don’t have the concentration of fruit.”
In addition to vine age, the weather also appears to play a part. “Lignification is seasonal; a Frenchman would say it’s terroir. Personally, I think longer hang time is conducive to lignification,” says Glover. He also notes that some blocks tend to lignify early while others don’t. Clay soils, in his opinion, inhibit lignification too.
With the 2012 harvest now in full swing, those “serious” Pinot producers will again be doing stem trials to take back to the 2013 edition of Marlborough’s campground convention. Let’s hope someone packs the first aid kit.
When New Zealand makes an unoaked Macon-like wine with 12 percent alcohol, which is cheaper than most Chardonnays in the country, it’s time to sit up and take notice.
Sacred Hill’s recently released Virgin Chardonnay is unoaked with no malolactic fermentation, creating a crisp clean wine with pure white stone fruit and citrus flavours. Having been disappointed all too often with expensive, buttery and oaky New Zealand Chardonnays (Villa Maria’s Keltern Chardonnay and Kumeu River excepting), I wondered why aren’t there more unoaked Chardonnays in New Zealand?
Australia is way ahead of its Tasman neighbour, making a host of earlier picked “unwooded” Chardonnays to satiate an ever-growing appetite for refreshing, crisp white wines.
Bish thinks the unoaked Kiwi Chardonnay has an undeserved reputation from the late ‘90s and early 2000s, when unoaked Chardy sales were going well. “I think the whole genre got a bit overplayed. It ended up being a not-very-flash vinous grocery wine selling under $15 and that tainted the category,” he says.
Then there’s the competition circuit, where delicate, understated wines get overwhelmed by the fruit and oak bombs. “Oaky Chardonnay wins awards. It [the Virgin Chardonnay] has not got a shitshow of winning a gold medal in a line up of Chardonnays,” says Bish.
Bish has been pestering his team to do a Chablis-like style for some time. “I have been nagging people to do it for years.” With the winery looking for something new to celebrate its 25th anniversary, Bish got his opening and the Virgin Chardonnay was born.
Unfortunately, the cool summer and all-round crappy weather in New Zealand’s north island means there won’t be any Chardonnay from the block used to produce Rifleman’s and the Virgin this year, so the 250 cases produced last year will have to last us until 2013.
In the meantime, I shall be on the lookout for more Virgins in New Zealand and leave you with a classic bit of Madonna…
Single vineyard Pinot Noirs are now emerging in New Zealand faster than Usain Bolt. Whether some of those ‘single vineyard’ wines are truly representative of a site is sometimes questionable in such a young country, but you have to start somewhere.
Larry McKenna, of Escarpment Vineyards in Martinborough was a truly early starter, making his first single vineyard Kupe in 2003. “It was the first single vineyard wine and the beginning of the concept from a particular part of the vineyard,” he says. “You have to have vine age to make single vineyard wines.”
And you also have to have decent weather. The following year, there was no Kupe. From the 2006 vintage he then added three more single vineyard wines: Kiwa, Te Rehua and Pahi only to be scuppered by weather again: in 2007, there were no single vineyard wines “because the vintage was not good enough,” he adds.
McKenna is influenced by Burgundy’s Domaine Dujac having spent a couple of vintages there in the 1990s. And Dujac loves to use stems in its winemaking, which is how I find myself on a dark night in central Auckland at an Escarpment tasting.
I am interested in stems/whole bunch fermentation in the production of New Zealand Pinot Noir. As, it seems, are the rest of the country’s serious Pinot winemakers – something I’ll be writing more about in the run up to Pinot 2013 in Wellington.
Stems add, in my opinion, spiciness to the wine, complexity, drive and structure, which generally improves ageability. Whole bunch ferments tend to have floral aromatics and lifted notes. So far so good.
McKenna adds more stems to his ferments than anyone else I know in New Zealand. Up to 40% of McKenna’s tanks are filled with whole bunches – stems ‘n’ all – with the rest of the vat filled with destemmed berries.
Why aren’t more people doing it? Well, you have to make sure your stems aren’t horribly green and thus bitter. Eventually stems turn brown – what’s known as lignification – but this often happens far too late in the day for Pinot Noir. It sometimes happens but no-one’s quite sure why. McKenna says “it’s a combination of warmth, UV light and vine age” amongst other things. In the 2011/12, season warmth and UV light have been in short supply so there will be fewer stems in his wines this year.
Wines using stems need a fair amount of stuffing to support the use of stems without looking green and bitter. This requires good base material so low yielding vines with age that have been planted in the right site in the first place. So, the fruit driven simple styles of many New Zealand producers are unlikely to feature stems but for those who are serious about making serious Kiwi Pinot, it’s a realm that is being explored.
McKenna has released the 2010 vintage of his single vineyard wines, which are currently as tight as a Yorkshireman’s wallet. While the alcohol on the Pahi and Te Rehua Pinot Noirs are a little hot on the finish, they are truly complex. Pahi is my pick of the bunch showing a tight, linear structure, and great core of fruit on the mid palate. It has purity of fruit showing plum with florals and violets (likely from the whole berry fermentation). Oak-derived coffee and cedar tones are still prominent but with time they will mellow. Patience required. An 18/20 in my tasting notes. $61.99 Fine Wine Delivery Co
Last week I filled in a questionnaire for an upcoming article about how to deal with the wine media, which turned out into a bit of a rant. I couldn’t believe it, the floodgates opened before me and I couldn’t stem the tide. I’m turning into a grumpy old woman, I thought.
So, here are some handy hints that might make the wine media look more favourably on your winery…
First off, what was my bugbear, I was asked? “Unsolicited samples,” I replied, ”sent out willy nilly when I don’t have any articles coming up that are vaguely related. “ It’s lovely to get free wine, but at the same time if you called first or sent an email to check if it was relevant you might save yourself a lot of money in postage and wine. Your accountant will also thank you.
And don’t send them in polystyrene. Aren’t wineries meant to be clean and green? I’ve had some people giggle at that request but you can’t recycle it, and it makes me snarl before I’ve even opened it up!
This weekend, God forbid I received an unsolicited sample in a polystyrene box. Not naming names, but initials V M, you know who you are.
If you do send a sample, we certainly don’t need tasting notes with the samples, which arrive in the polystyrene carton nine times out of 10. Surely the whole point of sending a bottle is so we can make our own mind up?
More technical information would be good such as pH, TA, alcohol, plus RRP and stockists - and your contact information! It’s as simple as putting a sticky label on the bottle with all these details rather than sending another piece of paper that is easily lost.
Medal mania
This morning I received two press releases telling me about bronze and silver medal wins. If it’s not a trophy at a major international competition, it will get deleted. Village shows, county fairs and competitions with your friend Jimmy don’t count.
And don’t send an email for every single wine that’s launched. It just makes us scratchy.
Remember, journalists are always looking for new and interesting things. Give us updates how the season is going – we often aren’t in the wine regions so it would be good to receive such information.
Are you running any trials in the vineyard or winery – that’s always interesting too. Is a member of your team doing something out of the ordinary? Wine is about stories and people. We have to go fishing in a large ocean for stories, so make sure you hook on to our bait.
And, if all else fails, spell our names correctly.
Right, that’s it, I’m off watch myself in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
Two weeks with no blog update. Disgraceful, you might be thinking. And you’d be right. Apologies.
If I can make excuses it’s because I’ve started a new job, working for wine-searcher.com. Currently a search engine to find wine and the best prices, it is launching an online wine magazine in April and I’ve joined the team. It currently has 1.5 million unique visitors a month with 60% of those visitors from the US of A. While we’re based in Auckland, New Zealand it’s going to have a global reach so we’ll be pulling a few strange shifts to make sure we don’t miss anything going on in Europe.
In the past fortnight, I have also been asked to be a panellist at Pinot Noir 2013 in Wellington, which is pretty exciting. I’ll be on a panel with hte likes of Lisa Perotti-Brown MW, Tim Atkin MW and Matt Kramer. Not bad for a girl from the Boro. I’ll have to practise my posh voice or no-one will understand my north-east accent
