Wine reflects soul of land

Damian Martin, general manager of viticulture and winemaking at Winegrowers of Ara, pulls our Pajero up on what I'd assumed was a large stopbank.
I wanted to have a wee chat about the special Marlborough sub-region known as Ara, but my concentration cracked the second he revealed that we were perched on a very active fault line.
"The geotech guys reckon it moves about 1.2m every 1700 years, which is actually a magnitude-eight quake," he says. "The last one we had was over 3000 years ago, so we're well overdue for another." Oh neat, best I not unclip my seatbelt then.
Beyond the faultline, the "appellation" of Ara is bordered by steep hills to the west and the Wairau River and Waihopai River on the other sides. Aside from the fact that this land has well-defined natural boundaries, the other key feature is the age of the soils, which date back to the last glaciation about 20,000 years ago. The glaciers started to melt and they carried down huge amounts of gravel and alluvial material that formed this terrace, which was then lifted by seismic activity.
"Before we planted grapes here it was just one big dry-stock farm and nothing except a bit of lucerne grew here," Martin says.
"Bankhouse Station was actually one the largest and most significant sheep stations in Marlborough. Back in the 1840s, Marlborough was essentially divided between two families, the Dillons, who owned lots of land east of the Waihopai River, and the Monros, who owned large amounts of land to the west of the river.
"Descendants of the Monros ensured this terrace stayed in family ownership right until 2001. It had been dry-farmed all that time, so it was pretty tough, bony sheep country out here."
The property itself is large - 1600ha - and blocks averaging 55ha have been planted each year since 2002. "We didn't do it all in one hit," says Martin. "There are eight different vine ages here now and we've planted the vineyard in pinot noir, sauvignon blanc, and recently 10ha of pinot gris."
But that's where similarities with other comparable developments end.
"I did all my viticultural and winemaking training in France and studied terroir to death," Martin says. "I learned an awful lot about the science and the technical side of soils and climate. But if you looked at the wines from the famous chateaux, it didn't actually matter how much you studied - you could only explain about 50 per cent of what was going on. The other 50 per cent was always linked back to people and their 'way' of doing things."
When Martin returned to New Zealand he decided that there was a very one-dimensional way of growing grapes here - "and particularly for something like Marlborough sauvignon it was like 'there's the template' and all the consultants and all the agronomists were saying 'this is the way you do it' and that inherently bothered me.
"So what I was keen to do was actually create a real point of difference with Ara using a philosophy that looked beyond the Marlborough stereotype."
At Ara they've adopted the French model of close-row planting and have avoided using drip irrigation in favour of overhead sprinklers. On such marginal land, many thought Martin had rocks in his head not putting irrigation lines in.
"I'm a big believer in celebrating regionality," says Martin, "but regionality becomes very hard to see if you apply the same viticultural model wherever you go. Irrigation regimes can dominate the specific regional characters you may have and they become much harder to see."
He believes the true colours of the fruit appear only when they're able to sustain themselves from the water and nutrients naturally present in the soil, and to do that the roots need to be down at least 2.5m.
"We water the vines with the sprinklers, and then we let the vineyard go for five or six weeks without. If it doesn't rain, then we give them another big drink, which simulates natural rainfall. From this we see from block to block a much wider diversity of expression in the fruit."
Ara soils are a mix of silt and gravel. "The gravel here has much greater water-holding capacity than, say, the Gimblett gravels in Hawke's Bay," says Martin, grabbing a handful of brown-yellow dirt. "The trick is to get the root systems down deep enough to draw the natural moisture present in the soils.
"The issue with drip lines is that the root systems tend to hang around where the drip is, and with all the readily-available moisture, organic matter and nutrients in the top layer of the soil the root systems just go out sideways and big clumps of roots grow under the drippers.
"By using the sprinklers which wet the entire ground area our aim is to drive the roots deep so that eventually we may never need to irrigate at all."
Clearly Martin's way is very Francais. "I think one of the key factors that separates old-world wine from new-world wine is that they don't use drip irrigation. The mid-palate, the texture, the pH balance that you get in old-world wines is very hard to achieve when you use drip irrigation.
"The acid balance and the mineral nutrition in the soil is very different when you're applying water constantly as opposed to occasionally dropping a dollop of water and letting the soil dry down naturally."
Martin says the Ara project is all about creating affordable, high-quality wines. "I could've found a postage stamp-sized vineyard to create an elite wine which sold for a high price, but that was never my driver. For me the technical and philosophical challenge was to make very good wine at scale, wine that had a real sense of place, real integrity, but was affordable. I want to create commercial quantities of wine that has soul."