“Making fine wine isn’t about impressing people, it’s about pleasing them,” believes Jen Parr, winemaker at Valli Vineyards since 2015. The Central Otago winery, whose current releases mark its 25th anniversary, recently organised a “vertical” tasting of its quartet of pinot noirs from the 2018, 2019 and 2020 vintages.
The first Valli wine flowed in 1998. Grant Taylor, the founder, built a strong reputation as the winemaker at Gibbston Valley from 1993-2006. Wine was an early hobby. Growing up at Kurow in the Waitaki Valley, he “used to get into Dad’s wine cellar, check what he had the most of, and take a bottle of that”.
Giuseppe Valli, Taylor’s great-great-grandfather who had a background in winemaking, migrated from Italy to New Zealand in the 1870s. Taylor has always had a clear objective at Valli: “To produce subregional pinot noirs, true to their source.” Today, Taylor and his wife, Nicole, run Valli Wine Bar in an art deco stone building built in 1934 that long served as the Kurow Post Office.
Enter Parr, an Oregonian whose interest in wine was aroused while she was studying at Stanford University in Northern California in the early 1990s.
“A couple of times a year, we would drive the two hours to go wine tasting in Napa.” After working in the financial software industry, she quit her sales job and shifted to Gaillac, in southern France, to learn about winemaking.
After arriving in New Zealand in 2003 to work the harvest at Villa Maria, Parr made wine in Hawke’s Bay and Waipara, before finally shifting to Central Otago as assistant winemaker at Olssen’s (now Terra Sancta). “I bought my house at Wānaka in 2009 and married a Kiwi in 2014. This is home.”
Valli’s pinot noirs are grown in Gibbston, Bannockburn and Bendigo as well as in the Waitaki Valley in North Otago. “I believe the vineyard is the real fabric of a wine,” says Parr. “Winemaking is the thread that ties it all together.”
So, what did the tasting reveal? The wines age well. Most are still unfolding. Those from the relatively warm Bannockburn and Bendigo subregions reveal the greatest power and density.
“The Gibbston and Waitaki reds perform better in tastings held in London than here,” reports Parr. But that’s another story …
Wine of the week
Valli Gibbston Vineyard Central Otago Pinot Noir 2022
★★★★★
This classy, very graceful red was hand-picked and matured in French oak casks. My pick of Valli’s 2022 pinot noirs, it is invitingly perfumed and weighty, with deep, ripe cherry, plum and spice flavours. It is complex, finely poised and lasting. Best drinking 2027+. (14% alc/vol) $85
