Camping Cuvees
Monday 23 April
Image: cartoonstock.com
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.
This blog has also been published on Pinot NZ 2013
A whole bunch of Pinot
Tuesday 10 April
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
A new job
Tuesday 13 March
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
German Pinot Noir a sleeping giant
Friday 4 November
German Pinot Noir has come to the attention of the wine world in the past week when it won seven of the top 10 spots in an international Pinot Noir tasting held in London.
And at the Hong Kong International Wine and Spirits Fair, the German Wine Institute was keen to show how important Pinot Noir has become.
Known as Spatburgunder, Germany has more hectares of Pinot Noir planted than New Zealand and Australia combined. It is also the third biggest producer of Pinot Noir after France and the USA, with 11,800 ha, Yet it has not enjoyed the same attention as new world Pinot, as most of it doesn’t leave Germany. Clearly they like to keep it all for themselves.
Red grape plantings have been rising since 1980, from just 11% of all plantings to 36% today. But we haven’t heard much about it until now.
“We just talked about Riesling and that did work but we came to a point where we had to broaden that. It’s important not to be a one-trick pony,” said the German Wine Institute’s Steffen Schindler.
While Baden is the leading region for Pinot Noir production with more plantings than Australia, it has failed to market its wines effectively beyond German borders. Having tasted a small selection today, it’s clear that Baden’s Spatburgunders offer an old world savoury style of Pinot with slightly riper fruit than you’d find in Burgundy, giving an appealing generosity. If they are affordably priced, they would be a big success in the UK and beyond. They just have to get out there and strike while the iron’s hot.
My pick:
Weingut Bercher Burkheim Pinot Noir 2008
A broody, pale Pinot Noir with classic old world savoury characters. The fruit is a little more generous than you’d expect from a Burgundy Pinot Noir and offers fine grained, drawn out tannins.
The week that was at decanter.com
Friday 12 August
August is a quiet month for the wine industry – most of France, Italy and Spain go on holiday. Yet, there’s been plenty to write about this week at Decanter.com, where I’m acting as news and commissioning editor. So here’s a digest of the main news stories in the wine industry this week…
Champagne
The Champenois have announced the yield for the 2011 vintage – 12,500kg – which is approximately 20% more than last year due to increased demand for bubbly. The Champagne houses wanted a higher yield with their sales up 13% last year but the growers weren’t so keen, and this was the compromise.
The Champagne region is now recovering from a blip during the economic crash of late 2008 and if sales continue on the upward curve it is now on, they’ll have a shortage. The industry is currently undertaking research to figures out a way to manage supply and demand. With a restricted area that is planted to bursting point, they will struggle to make more, so it will be interesting to see what solution they come up with.
Burgundy
In Burgundy, five grands crus vineyards are banning the use of machine harvesting from the coming vintage. I spoke to president of the Union of Burgundy Grands Crus, Louis-Michel Liger-Belair, during his holiday in Tuscany to ask him why they’d done this. There are 5% of the grands crus that use machines and it gives us a bad image. Hand harvesting does cost a bit more but the quality is much better,’ he said.
At the end of the week, Domaine de l’Arlot’s winemaker of 13 years has also left to establish his own domaine down in the Ardeche. More on that next week, I hope.
USA
Over in the US, there have been acquisitions aplenty. At the start of the week, Fiji water billionaire, Stewart Resnick bought Chardonnay specialist Landmark Vineyards of Sonoma. It’s the second purchase for his company Roll Global in eight months.
Roll Global is one to watch, as is Alejandro Bulgheroni. While most magazines reported his acquisition of Renwood Vineyard from the company’s press release, there seemed to be more to this one. A 20-minute chat with Alejandro, revealed he was not only a charming businessman that has made his millions in oil and gas, he’s also got grand designs for a wine empire, aspiring to run six wineries, including what’s thought to be the world’s southernmost vineyard.
UK
London rioters stormed Michelin-star restaurant The Ledbury at the start of the week, smashing windows and stealing personal items from customers. The Ledbury’s kitchen staff managed to chase away the rioters, armed with a variety of kitchen items. While it must have been terrifying for diners, The Ledbury offered them all Champagne to ease their anxiety.
Further restaurant news in London: Spanish chef Jose Pizarro will be opening a Cava bar at his new restaurant Pizarro. It is in Bermondsey Street – the same road as his newly-opened tapas and sherry bar. It should open in October. Should….
