Despite its short history of wine, these producers, from Central Otago and North Canterbury, are making bottles that are ravishing and distinctive.
The modern history of New Zealand wine is surprisingly short, particularly here on the South Island, home to regions including Central Otago and North Canterbury that, in just a few decades, have shown themselves capable of producing stunning wines.
Only in the 1960s, at the same time Napa Valley in California was beginning its ascent, did New Zealand make it legal to drink wine in restaurants. In the 1970s, the Government sponsored a programme to transform vineyards, pulling out lacklustre hybrid grapes that had been used to make cheap fortified wines, which accounted for the vast proportion of production, and replacing them with vinifera, the species of all the best-known wine grapes.
Still, by 1998, when Napa’s cult cabernets were making themselves irresistible to wealthy consumers, only about 10 vineyards existed in Central Otago, a region better known for its access to winter sports in the Southern Alps.
“Vineyards were met with a degree of incredulity,” said Duncan Forsyth, proprietor of Mount Edward Winery in Gibbston in Central Otago, who arrived in the region in 1992 to ski and never left. “There was a disbelief you could grow grapes.”
New Zealand today is best known for its sharp, pungent sauvignon blancs, particularly those from the Marlborough region in the northeastern-most part of the South Island. Those have proved wildly popular around the world, but they are most often mass-produced commodities and, to my mind, a rather limited calling card for a country capable of producing such distinctive wines.
In a week touring the South Island this year, focusing on the Central Otago and North Canterbury regions, I was far more interested in the superb pinot noirs, chardonnays, rieslings and chenin blancs I found, as well as a host of other wines that, depending on a winemaker’s interests and explorations, were often excellent.
New Zealand was the sixth largest wine exporter in the world by value in 2023, according to Tendata, a trade analyst. The United States was the No 1 market for those exports, at least before President Donald Trump’s recently imposed 15% tariff on the country’s products. Of the New Zealand wine imported into the United States, 93% was white, and 85% of those white wines were sauvignon blanc. Not a lot of the other wines are available to Americans.
That means Americans might have to search long and hard for some of the best wines I tried, from producers including Mount Edward, Rippon, Felton Road, Two Paddocks and Burn Cottage from Central Otago, and Black Estate, Pyramid Valley and the Hermit Ram in North Canterbury. Some of my favourite producers such as Sato Wines, which makes pure, precise wines in Central Otago, and Bell Hill Vineyards in North Canterbury, which makes world-class pinot noirs and chardonnays, are barely imported at all into the United States.
In Central Otago, Rippon was present at the creation of the region’s wine history. The estate dates to 1895, when the great-grandfather of Nick Mills, the current proprietor, purchased a huge swath of land. Over the century since then, much of it was sold. What remained, on the western shore of Lake Wānaka, became Rippon.
Mills’ father, Rolfe Mills, wondering what to plant on the land, noted similarities to the schist he had seen in Portuguese vineyards while serving in World War II. He began to experiment, planting 25 or 30 grape varieties, raising capital by selling pieces of the farm.
“He didn’t know pinot noir was going to be the way, but it floated to the surface fairly quickly,” Mills said. Nick Mills went to Burgundy to study viticulture, returning to take over in 2002. Rippon had always been organic, but Mills felt the biodynamic viticulture he had seen in Burgundy would fit naturally at Rippon.
The wines today are gorgeous, textured and precise, with an earthy minerality running through them.
Many of Central Otago’s leading lights today worked at or were deeply influenced by Rippon. The region grew slowly until 2002, when Robert M. Parker Jr., the leading critic of the era, visited the region and wrote glowingly of the wines.
“From there, we couldn’t sell enough wine,” Forsyth said, “mostly fruity, sweet and ripe, stuff that the average punter thinks is great.”
Fruity and sweet may be popular, but they are the antithesis of good pinot noir. The aim, as both California and New Zealand have learned, is to make wines with the right combination of intensity, subtlety and restraint, such as the floral, elegant 2019 Pisa Terrace pinot noir from Mount Edward.
“The best thing about this place is vibrance and transparency, tannin and texture,” Forsyth said. “The worst thing is the fruit. The trick is finding the balance.”
Restraint is very much on the minds of Nigel Greening, proprietor of Felton Road, and Blair Walter, a longtime winemaker. Like Rippon, Felton farms biodynamically. Its chardonnays, including the saline 2023 Block 6, and pinot noirs, including the 2023 Calvert, are precise, layered and textured.
“We have this basket of ripe fruit that’s available to us,” Walter said. “We try to capture it on a knife edge so it doesn’t overwhelm.”
North Canterbury is less well known than Central Otago, but wines from its best producers are no less interesting or accomplished. The best producers there, as in Central Otago, farm organically, biodynamically and regeneratively.
Black Estate was named for its founders, Russell and Kimiko Black, who planted their first vineyard in 1994, but has been owned since 2007 by Nicholas Brown and Pen Naish, a thoughtful, experimental husband-and-wife team. The estate now comprises three vineyards, each with its own personality and challenges.
The Damsteep Vineyard in particular is a gorgeous site, about 18 acres of limestone, sandstone and clay just about 10km from the South Pacific. The 2023 Damsteep pinot noir was fresh, lively and textured yet well structured. It would be fascinating to try again in 10 years. I also loved a powerfully stony 2023 chardonnay and a complex, floral chenin blanc, both from the Home Vineyard.
Black Estate also makes an excellent cabernet franc, which, like the chenin blanc, was inspired by the wines of the Loire Valley. Both are made without sulfur dioxide, an almost universally employed stabiliser and antioxidant. The cab franc is aged in amphoras.
One of the more unusual North Canterbury producers is Theo Coles of the Hermit Ram. He has recently planted his own vineyard on a super windy site, but mostly, he buys small lots of grapes from naturally farmed vineyards throughout North Canterbury.
Coles is an iconoclast, much given to experimentation. His wines are unusual – perhaps a blend of pinot noir and gewürztraminer or sauvignon blanc and chardonnay – but they are almost always interesting and distinctive.
“I make wines with structure but without tannins,” he said. “What does New Zealand taste like? Forest and animals.”
I’m not sure I would describe any of his wines that way, but I loved his 2023 Dead Flowers, that blend of pinot and gewürz, juicy, saline and easygoing – “one plus one equals three,” is how Coles described it. I also loved his herbal 2022 Urchins chardonnay and a light, elegant 2017 Limestone Hills pinot noir.
Perhaps no vineyard on the South Island is as unusual as Bell Hill Vineyard, first planted 28 years ago in a onetime lime quarry with the Southern Alps on the horizon. From its original area of roughly 20 acres, Bell Hill now covers almost 100 acres though only 10 acres or so are planted, entirely with chardonnay and pinot noir.
The married proprietors, Marcel Giesen and Sherwyn Veldhuizen, make no bones about their inspiration.
“Burgundy, that’s where our heart beats,” Veldhuizen said.
The former quarry, chalky limestone and weathered topsoil, forms a bell shape, hence the name.
“It’s not an easy place to farm,” Veldhuizen said. “Grapes and everything move fast here. The land exposes you.”
Along with their vines, the couple is devoted to increasing the biodiversity and preserving the wetlands that border the area, hoping to strengthen a self-sustaining ecosystem.
“You have such an intimate relationship with the vineyard, living plants and living soils,” Giesen said. “It’s the power of nature.”
Giesen came to New Zealand from Germany in 1983 to join his two brothers who had established Giesen Wines, one of the pioneers of the Marlborough region. He is still involved with Giesen, but he is devoted to Bell Hill.
The current vintage of Bell Hill is 2020, meaning the wines receive an unusual amount of ageing before they are released.
“The wines want that time,” Veldhuizen said. “They’re very shy in their youth. It’s not the easy way or the cheap way.”
The wines are superb. A 2020 Limeworks chardonnay, made from a single parcel of vines, was stony, herbal and pure, while a 2017 chardonnay was tense and energetic with gorgeous minerality. A 2020 pinot noir was fresh and delicate with precision, finesse and clarity.
Sadly, American consumers have little chance of seeing for themselves how good they are. Bell Hill currently has no official US importer, though an individual shop here or there may import the wines directly.
“It’s been incredible to be in the New Zealand wine business for 43 years, from the dark ages,” Giesen said. “It’s been a beautiful journey.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Eric Asimov
Photographs by: Tatsiana Chypsanava
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