Top 100 Wines of New Zealand 2018

If there’s one wine that most embodies the spirit of New Zealand and its people, it’s pinot noir. And it is patently clear from our 2018 list of Top 100 New Zealand wines that pinot is the dominant source of great wine in New Zealand. Pinot accounts for 15 of the top 20 wines and 53 of this Top 100 list. 

But while it dominates as a varietal, regional diversity is alive and well in New Zealand’s pinot noir camp with the regions of Central Otago, Martinborough, Waipara Valley and Marlborough all strongly represented and delivering uniquely different styles. Our top wine this year is the Rippon Tinker’s Field Pinot Noir 2015 – a wine that delivers intensity, detail and pleasure on a level all its own. It demonstrates the prowess of a great site that is farmed with intelligence, intuition and respect for harnessing the qualities of all that it touches. It’s also biodynamically farmed. 

Rippon Tinker’s Field Pinot Noir 2015 is number one this year.

The highly rated pinot noir wines in our top 20 read like a who’s who of New Zealand’s most respected pinot makers. Following Rippon, Bell Hill’s spectacularly detailed and layered 2015 is right at the top of its game, Escarpment Kupe 2016 is as good as ever with power and immense richness making for an impressive pinot, and Felton Road’s Block 3 2017 is an athletic and utterly delicious rendition of this consistently great wine. 

Three wines in particular show there’s so much more to New Zealand pinot noir than simply delicious fruit. Ata Rangi McCrone Vineyard 2015 is fragrant yet structurally stoic. The Prophet’s Rock Aux Antipodes 2016 is a collaboration between winemaker Paul Pujol and Burgundian François Millet and offers a uniquely different cultural and stylistic aim. And the Prophet’s Rock Retrospect 2013 delivers a sappy, succulent and juicily extruded structural emphasis.  

Other wines demonstrate the diversity of high-quality pinot noir on offer. There’s the refined Mount Difficulty Long Gully 2015, and two very different wines from Two Paddocks: The Fusilier 2017 (Bannockburn) and First Paddock 2017 (Gibbston Valley). Te Whare Ra offers an astutely honed SV5182 2014, Dog Point 2016 brings deeply expressed fruit and tannin while Quartz Reef has created an elegant and fine-boned Franz Ferdinand 2015. A symphonically rich Pegasus Bay Prima Donna 2015 offers yet more evidence of New Zealand pinot succeeding brilliantly across so many differing styles. 

Certainly the best syrah wines compare easily to the best wines of places like Côte Rôtie and manage to elucidate detail while dripping with flavor. The 2016 Bilancia La Collina Syrah is a triumphant statement of the enchanting possibilities for syrah to find finesse, kaleidoscopically aromatic allure, ripeness and freshness. Ditto Craggy Range, Vidal, Church Road, Ata Rangi, and Mission Estate, all of whom make an admirable showing of great New Zealand syrah in the Top 100 list. 

Rippon is Wanaka’s oldest vineyard. One family, five generations and a land farmed biodynamically with care and love.

Bordeaux reds represent phenomenal value and class within the New Zealand wine offering and the swagger of the Craggy Range Sophia 2016 is impossible to resist. It shows that power can be delivered with abandon and yet a wine can still find a point of harmony, balance and resolve. The same goes for the wines of Vidal, Esk Valley, Church Road, Alpha Domus, Stonyridge, Villa Maria, Babich and Mission Estate, which all feature in this year’s list. 

Chardonnay is the white wine style that rightly claims the most attention in this year’s list with Bell Hill, Kumeu River, Dry River, Pegasus Bay, Clearview, Neudorf and Smith & Sheth all making focused wines that speak strongly to the potential of place and experienced and considered winemaking. These wines carry immense flavor and richness that really command attention, yet they manage to deliver focus and find that WOW moment on the palate. 

And sauvignon blanc, that wunderkind white that has claimed such impressive recognition for New Zealand, proves it can reach impressive heights of quality and interest with a suite of cleverly focused and executed examples in this year’s list. There are 11 sauvignon’s in this year’s Top 100, all from Marlborough, New Zealand’s sauvignon capital. The styles of sauvignon we have championed are those that find power with elegance and deliver finessed styles that have a regard for quality in the vineyard first and foremost. It is great that this important wine style can rightly stake its claim among the very best that New Zealand has to offer. Enjoy our Top 100 of 2018. — Nick Stock, Senior Editor