The nitty gritty of Waipara Pinot Noir
Thursday 3 February
Just as I’m getting my head around subregional differences in Central Otago, Waipara develops the subregional thing.
Waipara sits an hour’s drive north of Christchurch, sheltered from easterly winds by the Teviotdale Hills. It’s a relatively young region and is still working out what works best and where. However, the region put on a tasting separating the three distinct types of site in the valley that are starting to show their influence.
Gravelly soils provide a lighter style of Pinot Noir with black and plum-like lifted fruits, a floral note, and peppery spice not dissimilar to that found in cooler climate Syrah. Try Crater Rim’s From the Ashes Pinot Noir or Kings Road Boundary Vineyard for a classic illustration.
Moving into the valley’s clay flats, the wines are more savoury and nutty. The tannins are quite firm in their youth and almost sandpaper-like in texture. Compared to the gravels, they are chunky wines. Theo Coles, winemaker at the Crater Rim, adds: “We have one site that’s like the hulk – it’s quite dense clay in the middle of the valley.” Try Waipara Springs’ Premo Pinot Noir or Muddy Water’s Slowhand.
According to Coles many blend both the gravel-sourced fruit with the clay-sourced fruit to give a better balanced wine – with spice and femininity from the gravels complementing the hulks from the clays.
The hillside sites are also interesting, giving a savoury and meaty, almost bloody quality to the wines. The wines in the line up were tightly structured and dense but this could have been due to low yields and stems included in the ferment – so these qualities may say as much about the producer as the site.
However, there’s certainly a case for looking at individual sites and, with increasing knowledge of specific site characteristics, this can only lead to better blends in the future.
Burgundy borders
Sunday 30 January
The lines of Burgundy’s famed wine villages were drawn by a cartographer’s pen but do they accurately reflect a wine’s sense of place?
This question was asked at the Central Otago Pinot celebration and but we never quite managed to get a definitive answer out of the illustrious panellists Sylvain Pitiot, director of Clos du Tart in Morey St Denis, and Sophie Confuron of Domaine Jean-Jacques Confuron. Ultimately, you have to make up your own mind.
It queried our acceptance of the existing lines drawn in Burgundy, which separate Volnay from Pommard, for example, or Nuits-St-Georges from Vosne-Romanee. Meursault Chardonnay is defined as fuller and more buttery than next door Puligny-Montrachet yet some Pulignys taste more Meursault-like. Can we really pigeon hole the styles so simply?
Well, these broadly generalised styles by village do serve us well but should not be relied upon.
A tasting of three Cotes de Beaune wines and three Cote de Nuits wines, some in the heart of the appellations, and others on the fringes illustrated that the sweeping statements that Pommard is structured while Volnay is perfumed and silky does have legs but it also has to be pointed out that the vintage and the hand of the winemaker can dramatically affect the wine style.
In addition, we all knew what was in each glass. If it had been a blind tasting, would we have been claiming the Nuits-St-Georges was so classically styled?
If you really wanted to try and get to grips with the differences between appellations in Burgundy, it’s a good idea to get three wines from the same producer from three different appellations over a number of vintages. But then you’d also need deep pockets…
The delicious, and well selected, wines were:-
Domaine Comtes Armand, Volnay 1er Cru, Les Fremiets 2007
Floral with cherry, minerality. Silky and supple, with moderate acidity and balanced alcohol. Fine grained tannins – almost imperceptible. Voluptuous, charming.
Domaine de Courcel, Pommard Premier Cru, Les Fremiers 2007
Made by a blood relation of Jacques Chirac, this was a firm, austere wine. Damson skin and black fruits, violets and warming clove/nutmeg type spice. Good mid palate weight. Structured fruit and stem tannins yet still incredibly fine and fresh acid. Alchohol perfectly integrated. Sinewy
Domaine de Montille, Pommard Premier Cru, Les Rugiens 2007
Described by Nick Mills of Rippon Estate as more silk scarves than wellies, this producer’s Pommard had plenty of weight and lots of new French oak spice. Muted cherry and subtle savoury character. None of that new world sweetness on the front palate, good mid palate concentration, finely woven tannins giving some structure – expected more ruggedness and a little more structure for a Pommard – is the fruit and oak perhaps masking the structure? Needs time.
Domaine Lechenaut, Nuits-St-Georges 1er Cru, Les Pruliers 2007
A relatively deep Pinot with a lot of new French oak coming through on the nose. Fleshy yet delicate on mid palate. Dense and tight tannin structure, with fresh acidity and a linear finish.
Domaine Jean Jacques Confuron, NSG 1er Cru Aux Boudots 2007 (on the border with Vosane Romanee)
Perhaps the wine of the day for most delegates. Silky and elegant on the mid palate, with a tight linear structure, sinewy finish, and fresh acid.
Domaine Grivot, Vosne Romanee 1er Cru, Les Chaumes 2007 (right on the border with Nuits St Georges)
Generous and fleshy on entry compared to Nuits St Georges, the tannins are mouthcoating and ripe rather than tight and drawn out.
Predictions for the Central Otago 2011 vintage
Friday 28 January
The 2011 vintage in Central Otago could be a whopper, which it needs like a hole in the head.
Near perfect weather at flowering, and recent rains boosting the berry size has created a bumper crop with up to 10 tonnes/70hl of Pinot Noir per ha and 14-15 tonnes/ha of Pinot Gris in some areas, including Bannockburn and the Pisa ranges. If all this fruit stayed on the vine, it would lead to an unwanted ocean of Central Otago wine.
Graeme Crosbie, owner of Domain Road in Bannockburn says “We need to be careful not to overcrop. 2008 was the year where we learned we shouldn’t do that.”
Every producer I have spoken to in the region is now in the process of cutting bunches off the vines to cut their Pinot Noir yields by as much as half to attain four to six tonne per hectare.
But what if they don’t give a damn about the oversupply? Could they leave the fruit on the vine and make loads of wine? Unlikely.
If they leave all this fruit on it simply won’t ripen, particularly with the season looking pretty cool. But it is inevitable grape growers looking to sell their grapes on the spot market will eke as much as they can out of the vines to make any money they can.
While the vast majority of producers are furiously crop thinning, biodynamic grower Nick Mills of Rippon Estate hasn’t had so much work to do. Why? “We don’t irrigate so the vines were stressed in spring time and that affected flowering was very good. We will do some crop thinning but simply to create better air flow rather than cutting yield.”
Remember, there’s still another eight weeks to go until harvest and anything could happen between now and then….
Don’t rush terroir in Central Otago
Thursday 27 January
It’s just over 20 years since the first Central Otago Pinot Noir was produced. Yet, we are already at the tenth annual Pinot celebration in the region. There has been such hype surrounding the region and so many comparisons to Burgundy that many wine lovers now want to start talking about discovering subregional differences. But isn’t it too much too soon for such a young winegrowing area?
Today, the region’s winemakers even admitted that terroir, a term that means a sense of place, does not yet truly exist in a region where most of the vines are under 10 years old. And it is a welcome relief to witness this acknowledgement. Let’s face it, how many centuries has Burgundy or Bordeaux had to get things right? But we forget this too often.
At the opening seminar of the event, Rudi Bauer, founder and winemaker at Quartz Reef went as far to say, “Stuff terroir. Let’s try to look at a sense of belonging. It’s much closer to our hearts. We want to express ourselves.”
“And it’s alright to make mistakes,” he added.
Matt Dicey of Mt Difficulty agreed: “We are at the beginning of a journey that takes a long time. To use the term terroir implies a level of knowledge and I think we have a long way to go. Terroir is a future technology term.”
Many of the region’s vines are still putting their roots down and the incredibly poor soil is just starting to see some life. Bauer told delegates: “Our soils have never learned to express themselves. But if anything grows guess who takes it? A rabbit. We have to build up organic matter. We are just learning how to build it up.”
Both Bauer and Dicey were backed up by the founding father of the region, the softly spoken Alan Brady. “We had no preconceptions when we started. We wil go on finding out over the next 300 or 500 years. We are all experiencing landmarks along the way. We experience disappointments and high points. We will go on doing that because that is what wine is about.”
Yet, many of us still seek to rush the development of Central Otago and many other New World regions in a game of catch up with the Old World. Isn’t it time we exercised some patience?
Pinot producers’ pedal power
Wednesday 26 January
As a region, Central Otago makes great wines and has already done a good job of pulling together to promote its wines worldwide. It’s also good at building relationships which is why I found myself back in Queenstown today going for a muddy mountain bike ride in the pouring rain with three winemakers.
It was not a perfect day for cycling – nor for cricket. New Zealand was supposed to be taking on Pakistan in Queenstown today but rain stopped play. It didn’t stop the hardcore cycling winemakers. I was offered the choice of pulling out but that would have been too easy. If you let a bit of wet weather stop you cycling in England, you’d never sit on a saddle again. Funny then, that England invented the five day cricket game, a soggy Matt Dicey of Mt Difficulty responded.
Several falls (Dicey 1: Gibb 2), a bloody knee, and bruised hip later, three sodden, mud-stained winemakers were drinking tea and taking warm showers in my bathroom. The bathtub is now full of silt, grit and wet clothes and I’m sure the chamber maid will be cursing me tomorrow. But it’s been a good day for wine, relationship building and spectacular views from the saddle. And the Pinot celebration – which, is the reason for me being here – hasn’t even started yet.
I’ll be keeping you updated of all the goings-on from the seminars and after-school events on the blog and through twitter…