Yoshiaki Sato came to Central Otago, New Zealand, about 13 years ago to live his dream with his wife, Kyoko, to make beautiful wines. Both gave up their successful international banking careers based in London to learn about and make fine wines on the hillsides of Lake Dunstan, a rugged and isolated area near the small town of Cromwell.
“We still have problems, but I am feeling we are lucky now and we survived this moment,” Sato said as we tasted about a half dozen of his handmade, minimum intervention wines in his simple, modern winery surround by his six hectares of vineyards planted mostly with pinot noir but also gamay, riesling, chenin blanc and chardonnay. Kyoko had just come in from a long day of training the vines. Her faced looked flush from the pure, ice cold wind coming off the volcanic mountains. They both do all the work in their vineyards and winery and make 30,000 bottles on their own. “I give thanks to everything,” Sato said. “We make what I believe are nice wines. We have to look forward to the future and hold our faces high.”
A few hours before the meeting with Sato, Nick Mills was walking through his pristine 15 hectares of vineyards in Central Otago on the shores of Lake Wanaka, which was formed during the ice age though glacial erosion. His winery, Rippon, is about a 45-minute drive from Sato. Mills and his family can date their origins as landowners and farmers back to 1912, when his grandfather Percy Mills came to Central Otago from Australia and bought a massive homestead, called Wanaka Station. Today it’s a tiny fraction of the size but it’s etched deep in the hearts of his family.
“He was a pastoralist,” Mills said, sitting on a grassy section on a hillside just above his vineyards as a young worker was hand-seeding a cover crop for his vineyards as nutrients to their spring growth. “He was looking at anything that could express the land best. It could be animal stock, fruit, or water systems – anything. He wanted to be a self-sustaining farmer.”
Mills takes inspiration from his late grandfather in looking at different aspects to create a perfect ecosystem for his vineyards of mostly pinot noir but also riesling. Most of his 15 hectares of vines are planted on their own rootstock. And visitors to the vineyards, not the winery for tastings, are required to wear clean shoes that have never touched other vineyards in New Zealand due to the possibility of spreading the pesky root louse phylloxera. Any new plantings in his vineyards come from a massale selection of his family’s original plantings from the 1980s.
“We want our vines to be comfortable, so they produce the best fruit possible,” he said, walking toward his no-nonsense winery that is essentially a farm barn with stainless vats, old barrels and various other essential winemaking equipment. He is another winemaker emphasizing low intervention in winemaking in New Zealand and biodynamic viticulture.
Mills and Sato are examples of the many winemakers dedicated to organic and biodynamic viticulture and holistic winemaking that give New Zealand a unique and attractive story to its cool-climate wine world. My team and I combined spent almost one month in Auckland and six other wine regions in the country, from Waiheke Island on the North Island to Central Otago on the South Island, tasting hundreds of wines, visiting many vineyards and speaking to dozens of winemakers, The warmness and commitment of so many of the winemakers we met came through in so many of their wines, with the best wines clearly communicating their vineyard soils, aspects and microclimate. It’s all about creating and maintaining ecosystems for making top-quality wines.
“When we started here, I was 34 years old; we came to make our wine,” said Sato, pouring his spectacular-quality gamay. “We tasted some wines from Central Otago. We loved traditional wines such as Burgundy. When we decided to make our wine, we needed to have our own story. What is the appropriate place? We thought of California, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. We came here.”
This year we rated more than 850 wines from New Zealand, which is our biggest tasting ever of wines from the island nation. As expected, pinot noir dominated our list of top wines, and the majority were produced either in the regions of Central Otago or Martinborough.
READ MORE: TOP 100 WINES OF NEW ZEALAND 2021
“We export close to 40 wines around the world, and our wines are driven by other great pinot noirs from around the globe,” Blair Walter, the thoughtful owner and winemaker of Felton Road, said on a cold and raining day at the winery. “That to me is less tangible but weighs on the back of our minds here.”
Over the years, his pinots, especially his single-vineyard bottlings, have been inspiring to us and many others. They deliver pinpointed structure and character from biodynamically farmed vineyards. They also have less concentration and more finesse to allow them to show their origins better.
“There was more ambition and ego when winemakers were trying to force something out of the vines,” he said in explaining how his winemaking practices were much more extraction-oriented compared with today. He now looks to softer fermentations and macerations to make more transparent, refined and textured wines.
“Ten to 15 years ago, everyone was fighting for each vineyard to be a great Central Otago pinot,” he said. “We overdid the winemaking, Across the region now, you taste central Otago pinot I would be proud of.”
Equally proud was Hiroyuki Kusuda, who devotes most of his time tending to two hectares of prime vinelands in Martinborough, about an hour’s flight north of Central Otago on the southern part of the North Island. His young pinots have incredible purity and precision, and he does almost all the work himself in the vineyards. “I just want to see the fruit in the glass,” he said stoically after a long day working in his vineyards. “That’s my statement. I don’t want to show my hands” in my wines.
He explained during a tasting of his pinots, syrah and riesling that he discovered the magic of Martinborough pinot while tasting wines in London about two decades ago. And he found it “the closest thing to Burgundy.” But it took him about 10 years to get to New Zealand, and he started making wines after studying winemaking at the prestigious wine school of Geisenheim in Germany, as well as having various winemaking experiences in Europe and New Zealand.
READ MORE GREAT VALUE WINES: NEW ZEALAND PINOT NOIR FOR LESS THAN $35
FORGOTTEN BORDEAUX BLENDS?
The passion and dedication were equally exuberant for many winemakers of cabernet sauvignon and other grape types for Bordeaux blends. They seem much more under-the-radar than pinot or sauvignon blanc makers when thinking about their marketplace. Perhaps they have smaller productions, or the buzz about the wines in the 1980s when New Zealand was first coming onto the international wine scene gave way to pinot? I remember some of the first international tastings of New Zealand in the mid-1980s in London, when the wine trade was extremely excited about cabernet sauvignon and Bordeaux-inspired wines in general.
“Why have Bordeaux blends been forgotten?” asked James Vuletic of Providence Vineyards, which is an hour’s drive outside of Auckland in the Matakana region and whose small-production Bordeaux blends are considered cult wines at home and abroad, particularly Japan. “Pinot has become a fashion. And it’s easy drinking. Bordeaux by nature you have to think about it.”
His reds age beautifully, which was more than evident tasting some of his reds back to the early 2000s. Plus, they are made from organically grown vineyards and made with very low sulfur.
A visit to Waiheke Island, a 40-minute ferry ride from Auckland, was equally thought-provoking on the trip. The deep water bay that surrounds the island acts as a buffer to the cold and keeps temperatures mild during the vine-growing season as well as cushioning the volatility of the weather in the area.
“Waiheke is almost its own country,” said American Michael Spratt, who owns the most famous winery on the island, Destiny Bay. His top wines, such as Magna Praemia, sell for over $350 a bottle and they are difficult to find. “We have a hotter and drier climate, and it gives flavors to other grape varietals, unlike other areas.”
The special climate comes through in his and dozens of other wines we tasted from the island. The Destiny Bay wines, for example, have a majority of cabernet sauvignon in the blends but also use malbec, petit verdot, cabernet franc and merlot. They show a surprising richness and depth that you would more likely find in a Napa cabernet rather than a red from this chic island. “It’s all normal here,” said Spratt while tasting a range of his wines in his small winery. “The grapes get ripe!”
Paul Dunleavy, one of the owners of Te Motu winery, which is about a 20-minute drive from Destiny Bay, organized a larger tasting and dinner with more than a dozen wineries the same day as the Destiny Bay visit, and I rated most of the wines outstanding quality – and some as classic. The top were mostly cabernet sauvignon-based, such as bottles from Destiny Bay, Stoneyridge, Man O’War, Passage Rock, Mudbrick Vineyard and Te Motu. “Where else in New Zealand can you grow great cabernet?” Dunleavy said during the day. “It’s great here!”
The fact is there are a lot of great regions and vineyards in New Zealand, despite the relatively small total size of slightly less than 100,000 acres of vineyards. The state of California has six times the amount of vineyards. Yet, one has to wonder if New Zealand will be one of the last places on earth to be affected by global warming because the environment is clear, unpolluted and protected. And the five million New Zealanders seem active and keen to preserve their special place.
“Global warming is not bad because we are an island in the middle of the ocean and not a massive continental land mass,” said Felton Road’s Walter. “So, we don’t have the same warming effect. Our weather is affected by the warming of the ocean. Our winters are warmer, and the summers are cooler, but nothing is significant [with global warming] at this stage.”
Helen Masters of Ata Rangi wines in Martinborough, who’s one of the best winemakers in the region, added that she and other winemakers were more concerned with the more severe weather events during the vine-growing seasons, such as severe frosts or disease. “We need to be more flexible and be ready to react,” she said. “This change has been due to global warming.”
This readiness and awareness in trying to preserve their country’s natural state despite the changes in most of the rest of the world comes through while speaking to so many New Zealanders. “We have lots of interested young people here because they are interested in saving their future,” said Rudi Bauer of Quartz Reef in Central Otago. “They know that they are doing something for their generation and moving forward.”
THE NEVER-ENDING QUEST TO MAKE BETTER WINES
The main ominous cloud over New Zealand is its reliance on high-production, low-priced wines, particularly sauvignon blanc. Three out of four bottles of wine exported are made from sauvignon blanc, which accounts for about 86 percent of all grapes planted, according to New Zealand Wine, the wine industry organization. Traveling to the region of Marlborough is an eye-opener, with its thousands of hectares of agro-industrial vineyards and inexpensive wines. Unfortunately, this is what most wine lovers in the world think about New Zealand wine because these bottles are most present on the world wine market.
“It’s a problem because we are defined by agro-industrial winemaking,” said Sam Weaver, who makes handmade pinot noir and sauvignon blanc from biodynamically farmed vineyards in Marlborough for his label, Churton. He explained while tasting his wines on an outdoor picnic table at his winery a few weeks ago that it was hard to sell his high-class sauvignons because people said they already know Marlborough sauvignon blanc, and that pinot noir was also difficult to sell because everyone thinks of Central Otago when it comes to pinot and not his region.
“It’s beginning to be different,” he said. “At the mass level, you have agro-industrial stuff and at another level you see smaller people making more natural wines with fruit weight and structure… We are trying to show the integrity of the vintage and maximizing the potential of what we have. We are refining the things that we do and making more refined wines.”
Refinement is a word that well-describes the outstanding quality wines of our biggest tasting of New Zealand wines ever. Most of the wines we rated were of outstanding quality, and an impressive 144 were classic quality – 95 points or more. The freshness, clarity and elegance of these comes through brightly.
And there’s a feeling that more and even better quality wines are on the horizon after speaking with producers or drinking a few of their excellent-quality bottles, especially with a number of great vintages, such as one of the best ever – 2020.
“We are still searching to make better wines,” said Felton Road’s Walter. “I had the conversation with my parents. They were raised in a miserable cold farmhouse. We are still so close to our pioneering roots. People only arrived en masse here about 120 years ago. There is so much more to come.”
– James Suckling, Editor/Chairman
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