New Zealand seems a long way from everything, and it is. But there’s a magical feeling walking the vineyards, meeting the winemakers, tasting the wines and breathing the fresh air. It may be the most pristine wine place on earth, and I was there touring vineyards for 10 days last month from Auckland on the North Island to Central Otago in the south.
The vast majority of the top wines in this weekly report come from some of New Zealand’s most breathtaking vineyards and soulful producers, including Rippon, Ata Rangi, Felton Road, Kusuda and Sato. The latter two wineries are run by dedicated, even obsessive, Japanese viticulturists and winemakers who are two of the most amazing human beings I have met in wine during my four-decade career as a wine journalist and critic.
“It was not easy, but if you want to do something in your life you need to take risks,” said Yoshiaki Sato, who with his wife, Kyoko, makes a handful of wines such as pinot noir and gamay from hillside vineyards in New Zealand’s Central Otago. They have been making wine for about a decade and they have been doing all the vineyard work (about five hectares) and cellar work themselves. “If you have something you really want to do, you have to go that way. You can’t keep safe.”
READ MORE: TOP 100 WINES OF NEW ZEALAND 2021
Hiroyuki Kusuda is equally devoted to his two hectares in some of the prime vineland of Martinborough, about an hour’s flight away north in the southern part of the North Island. He does all the work himself to make a few precious bottles of pinot and riesling, with the exception of a dozen or so followers from Japan who come to volunteer their time to pick grapes and make wine during the harvest. “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.
Indeed, it’s the purity of fruit that the top wines of New Zealand impress you with. It reminds me of drinking pure glacial water in the California Sierra Nevada mountains while backpacking in remote areas during the 1970s as a teenager. That essence of place and genuine feeling comes through in tasting and drinking great wines of New Zealand, such as the best from Sato and Kusuda.
And that’s not only drinking young wines. The report also includes some mini-verticals from the vineyards in the Matakana area about an hour’s drive north of Auckland from the Gillman and Providence wineries. They show that New Zealand wines age beautifully and they don’t need to be just pinot noir, considering both Gillman and Providence are Bordeaux-inspired.
LOW-ALCOHOL GOLD
In Germany, Senior Editor Stuart Pigott struck low-alcohol gold while tasting in the Rheingau region.
“One of the things I frequently get asked by readers is where they can find great dry wines with moderate alcohol,” Stuart said. “The fact is, many categories of wine, like the Australian shiraz we were tasting just a few weeks ago [during the tasting team’s trip Down Under], need a certain amount of alcohol to have the volume and mouthfeel we expect. Mostly with less than 13 percent, they just taste thin.”
But Stuart found an exception to that rule when he visited the Georg Breuer winery. “The 2021 growing season was rather cool and the harvest late, and if the producer got everything right in the vineyard, like Theresa Breuer of Georg Breuer did, then amazing concentration and aromatic complexity was possible at low alcohol levels,” Stuart said.
All four of Georg Breuer’s single-vineyard dry rieslings from 2021 clock in at just 11.5 percent alcohol and were very highly rated, with the Georg Breuer Riesling Rheingau Berg Schlossberg 2021 being one of the top dry wines of the vintage in Germany.
“The 2021 vintage really suited our wine style,” Theresa Breuer commented. She’s been making the wines since the sudden death of her father, Bernhard, back in spring 2004.
At the other end of the Rheingau, Stuart was impressed by the dry rieslings from a much less well-known producer. “Reiner Flick from Weingut Joachim Flick is a classic example of a German producer with excellent quality who regularly sells out, but stubbornly stays below the radar,” Stuart said, “maybe that’s going to change from the 2021 vintage.”
Flick’s dry riesling GGs from 2021 are the best wines the winery has ever showed us, but these won’t be released for almost a year. However, the already released ELs are also really impressive. (Erste Lage is one step below GG, or Grosses Gewachs, in the German vineyard classification system). “Indeed, every single wine was really good, which is quite an achievement for the challenging 2021 vintage.”
“Alongside the influence of Reiner’s daughter Katharina, who’s just finishing her degree at Germany’s top wine university, Geisenheim, there’s a definite change of style in the single-vineyard wines due to the influence of Flick’s new winemaker, Matteo Betteto,” Stuart said. “He did a lot of clever lees work on these wines.”
Italian winemakers in Germany could be a new trend, pushed by climate change. Watch this space!
READ MORE THE OTHER GREAT PINOT NOIR: TASTING BACK TO THE GOLDEN AGE OF GERMANY’S SPATBURGUNDER
HIGH-ALTITUDE CHARDONNAY
Associate editor Nathan Slone and taster Andrii Stutsiuk recently finished up their ratings of the wines of South Africa, where they were stationed in Stellenbosch for a few weeks and tasted their way through more than 850 wines. They sat down and spoke with some of the country’s top producers as they put together our annual report on the country, which we will post soon. While the Stellenbosch region is perhaps best known for cabernet sauvignon and Bordeaux blends, we feel even more strongly that there is a bright future for chardonnay in the area.
This thought was seconded by the owner of Vilafonte Wines, Mike Ratcliffe, who said “high-altitude chardonnay in Stellenbosch might be a huge development for the region,” even though he does not yet produce it himself. But others already do. Uva Mira, which made our highest-rated South Africa chardonnay last year, remains a high-water mark for the country this year with its Single Tree Chardonnay 2018.
Uva Mira’s oenologist and general manager, Christiaan Coetzee, said the winery’s altitude was the key to making a great chard. “You get a lot silkier tannins with our altitude. Mineral too. Wines with elegance and longevity – not powerful wines but they have punch,” he said. The Single Tree Chardonnay is dense and elegant with wonderful weight and phenolic texture, and it showcases the potential that chardonnay has in Stellenbosch when the correct site is treated with respect for its terroir and inherent character.
Vilafonte and Uva Mira are just two names on a growing list of producers who are focused on quality and terroir – the so-called premiumization of South African wine. Bordeaux varieties have continued to show their strength, but chardonnay is gaining in quality each year. You can get the full scoop in our annual report next week…
– James Suckling, Editor/Chairman; Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor; Nathan Slone, Associate Editor
The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated during the past week by James Suckling and the other tasters at JamesSuckling.com. They include many latest releases not yet available on the market, but which will be available soon. Some will be included in upcoming tasting reports.
Note: You can sort the wines below by country, vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.
