White Wine

Few wine producing countries have quite so sharp an image as New Zealand. The word sharp is apt, for the wines are characterized by piercingly crystalline flavours and bracing acidity. But then a high proportion of the world's wine drinkers will never have experienced proof of this, for New Zealand is not just one of the most isolated countries on earth (more than three hours' flight from its nearest and domineering neighbour Australia), but is also small. It produces about the same amount of wine as Cyprus, less than a tenth as much as Australia. Many people who try New Zealand wines fall madly in love with them.

This has happened only recently. In 1960 the country had less than 1,000 acres (400 ha) of vines, mainly in Auckland and Hawkes Bay and too many of them hybrids. By 1980 there were 14,000 acres (5,600 ha), 2000 of which were in the brand-new Marlborough region on the South island. The 1980's saw stabilization and upgrading. In this first boom poor varieties were planted in unsuitable places. Prices fell alarmingly. A government programme in the mid-1980's grubbed out over a third of the acreage. This was followed in the 1990's by the most amazing expansion - it almost seemed as though anyone with a few acres wanted to try their hand at vine-growing - so that by 2000 the total was more than 30,000 acres (12,000 ha) and there were 358 wineries, double the numbers of just seven years before.

It was New Zealanders who coined the term and bought in the concept of a "lifestyle winery": a bucolic way of life whereby, typically a fine educatioh is focused on producing, in the most pleasing environment, one of life's more delicious commodities from the earth.

New Zealand had some natural problems to contend with before this enthusiasm could be positively harnessed. Only 150 years ago much of this long, thin country was covered with rain-forest. Soils here tend to be so rich in nutrients that vines, like everything else, grow too vigorously for their own good, a phenomenon exacerbated by the country's generous rainfall. Because of this, New Zealand wines in the 1970's and 1980's too often tasted of leaves rather than fruit, especially the reds. Grapes were often simply too heavily shaded to ripen properly.

The introduction of canopy management techniques, notably by state viticulturist Dr Richard Smart, changed all this, and allowed light to shine both literally and figuratively on New Zealand's unique style of wine. (Professor Hans Schultz of Geisenheim argues that increasing ultraviolet radiation due to ozone depletion in the southern hemisphere is also helping to build pronounced wine flavours even at New Zealand's high latitudes).

Winegrowing New Zealand lies, in terms of the northern hemisphere, on latitudes between those of Morocco and Bordeaux. The effects of latitude are countered though by the Pacific, by strong prevailing westerlies and by the effects of the mountains on their rain-clouds: factors that give the two islands a wide range of growing conditions - almost all cooler than the bare figures suggest. Enthused by the relative coolness (compared with Australia) most growers initially took Germany as their model. Far too much Muller-Thurgau was planted as a result.

Chardonnay finally overtook this dreary grape (admittedly less dreary in New Zealand than in Germany) in 1992 and it has been the country's most planted vine variety ever since, made in a relatively narrow range of crisp, often oaked styles.

It was not Chardonnay but Sauvignon Blanc, however, that made the world take notice of New Zealand. After all, decent Chardonnay is made virtually everywhere; a cool climate is needed if Sauvignon is to be lively, and the coo, bright, sunny, and windy northern tip of the South Island seems to have been designed to intensify the scarcely subtle twang of Sauvignon. Early examples in the 1980's opened a Pandora's box of flavour that no one could ignore and most importantly, no other part of the world seems able to replicate.

The success of Marlborough Sauvignon, a wine you either love or hate, has made Sauvignon Blanc almost as widely planted in New Zealand as chardonnay. But the third most important variety, by an increasingly large margin, is Pinot Noir, enjoying success for much the same reason as Sauvignon Blanc: New Zealand's cool climate. In a surprisingly wide range of wine regions, this finicky grape offers another chance of succeeding where so many others (most importantly, much of Australia) have failed.

Among other red grapes, Merlot overtook the inconveniently late-ripening Cabernet Sauvignon in 2000. Bordeaux blends are in general more popular with Kiwis themselves than outside in the big, wide, Cabernet-saturated world. Other significant grapes include Riesling (which can be very fine here, either dry or sweet but too oftenj in between) and other hopes are variously invested in Pinot Gris, Semillon, Gewurztraminer and Cabernet Franc. Isolation has proved no defence against vine pests and diseases. Most of these new plantings are grafted onto phylloxera-resistant rootstocks.

New Zealand wine has come a long way since it was known locally as "Dally plonk", a reference to settlers from Dalmatia, lured from the kauri-gum forests of the far north to plant vineyards near Auckland in the early 20th century. They persisted despite a rainy subtropical climate; several of the families in what is now a surprisingly good red-wine area have Dalmatian names. As in Australia's Hunter Valley, cloud cover moderates what could be overmuch sunshine and gives steady ripening conditions. Vintage-time rain and rot are problems. The most ingenious (and successful) answer has been to plant, as it were, out to sea - on an island east of the city that misses the mainland rain. Waiheke island's Stonyridge and Goldwater Cabernets are evidence of a mesoclimate miraculously right for Bordeaux grapes.

Of the wineries using West Auckland grapes, Kumeu River is the most successful. Collards is another largely edicated to local fruit. Most other Auckland wineries such as Nobilo's and Selaks (both owned by Hardys of Australia), Babich, Matua Valley, Delegat's and Villa Maria draw on other wine regions for the majority of their grapes.

The wine giant Montana has over 60% of the New Zealand market following its purcfhase of Corbans (the second largest company) in 2000. Both ferment in local sub-wineries in Gisborne, Hawkes Bay or Marlborough and finish their wines in Auckland. But many wine producers still transport white grapes long distances to their own crushers - a process that is not without some risk.
Gisborne on the east coast of the North island (it has another name, Poverty Bay), like so many of New Zealand's wine regions) is a good example of a region plundered by the bottlers. It is the country's third most important wine region , after Marlborough and then Ne4w Zealand's answer to Bordeaux: Hawkes Bay, but has very few wineries. Gisborne, warmer but wetter than Hawkes Bay, especially in autumn, grows almost exclusively white grapes on relatively fertile soils and it has a particular reputation for Chardonnay.

The North Island's most exciting area for Pinot Noir is variously called Martinborough, Wairarapa and Wellington; it is just an hour's drive west of the nation's capital over the mountains and into the country's eastern rain shadow. Temperatures may be lower but autumns are drier here than in other North Island wine regions, and its nearly 40 wineries, led by Ata Rangi, Martinborough Vineyards, and Dry River, have made some of New Zealand's most vividly varietal Pinot Noir so far. It has ranged from potently plumy to lean, dry and earthy; but then so does burgundy. Here Chardonnay ripens well, keeping high acidity, while Riesling has demonstrated real potential.

Just across the windy straits on the South island, the little Nelson region to the west of Marlborough has higher rainfall and richer soil than Martinborough but does well with similar grape varieties.

Meanwhile, well south of Marlborough, onj the plains surround Christchurch and an hour's drive north in undulating terrain at Waipara, Canterbury's winemakers are producing crisp, flinty Rieslings and Chardonnays as well as Pinot Noir ranges from disappointingly herbal ro tantalizingly promising in extremely varied environments. Canterbury's grapes struggle to ripen in some years. Even further south, testing the limits of cool-climate grape-growing, is Central Otago, the world's southernmost wine region. In this mountainous inland region the climate is not maritime, as in the rest of New Zealand, but continental, and vines have to be planted on hillsides to maximize radiation and escape frost danger. In a good year, however, Central Otago can produce Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris, and Riesling to rank among New Zealand's finest, and many believe that this is where the Pinot grail is to be found. The old contention that New Zealand conditions are close to German is truer here than anywhere - and marginal vineyards can make wonderful wine.

MARLBOROUGH

One settler planted vines at Meadowbank in Marlborough in 1867 but for most of the 20th century the South Island grew cereals, sheep and nothing as exotic as vines until 1973 when Montana, the country's dominant wine producer, cautiously established a small commercial vineyard in Marlborough.

Lack of irrigation caused teething problems but by 1980 the first release had been bottled and the special intensity of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc was too obvious to ignore. Such an exhilarating, easy-to-understand wine clearly had extraordinary potential, rapidly realized by, among others, David Hohnen of Cape Mentelle in Western Australia. In 1985 he launched Cloudy Bay, whose name evocative label, and smoky almost chokingly pungent flavour have since become legendary.

Montana's gamble was vindicated in 1990 when Marlborough overtook Hawkes Bay and Gisborne to become the country's most planted wine region (but with a mere nine wine producers). By the turn of the century it had more than 10,000 acres (4,000 ha) under vine, almost half of them less than six years old. The number of wine producers had risen to 62 and the proportion of fruit leaving the region in bulk to be shipped across the Tasman Straits for processing in the North Island plummeted - much to the benefit of the resultant wine. Today an increas8ng proportion of the growers who once sold their grapes to one of the big companies have their own label, which may well be applied at one of the region's busy contract wineries.

The wide, flat Wairau Valley has become a magnet for investors and those who simply like the idea of making wine their life - even if some of them have been planting so far inland that grapes may not necessarily ripen every year, and on land where the valley's precious water supply is scarce.

What makes Marlborough special as a wine region is its unusual combination of long days, cool nights, bright sunshine, and in good years, dryish autumns. In such relatively low temperatures grapes might have difficulty ripening wherever autumn rains threatened, but here they can usually be left on the vine to benefit from a particularly long ripening period, building high sugars without, thanks to the cool nights, sacrificing the acidity that delineates New Zealand's wines.

The diurnal temperature variation is most marked in the windy Awatere Valley, pioneered by Vavosour and now probably at saturation point because of a shortage of water. Both budbreak and harvest tend to be later in Awatere than on the Wairau Valley floor but summers can be long and hot enough to ripen Bordeaux varieties - in contrast to the main swathe of vineyards in the Wairau Valley. The much-photographed Brancott vineyards also tend to lag behind the valley floor because of their elevation.

But perhaps the most significant variation in Marlborough is that of soils. North of Highway 63, with a few exceptions round Woodbourne, soils are very much younger than those to the south. In places the water table can be dangerously high and the best vineyards on these young, stony soils are the best drained, on light loams over the shingle that was once the river bed. Mature vines develop deep root systems although young vines need irrigation to survive the dry summers.

South of the highway, the lowest-lying older soils are too poorly drained for fine wine production, but higher-altitude vineyards on the exposed barren southern edge of the valley can produce interesting fruit from much drier soils.

Marlborough is almost clearly capable of producing exception quality in Chardonnay, and in Riesling too with some inspiring late-harvest examples. But there is every sign that the region will be a source of serious particularly fruity Pinot Noir as the region's growers pool knowledge of and enthusiasm for this new string to their bow.
The characteristically high acidity of grapes grown in Marlborough means that malolactic fermentation is crucial for still wines, and that the region can poroduce some fine base wines for sparkling wine. The champagne houses have been putting down roots here, and Cloudy Bay's Pelorus is just one sign of another of Marlborough's distinctions.

HAWKES BAY

In New Zeland terms, Hawkes Bay is an historic wine region, having been plantee by Marist missionaries in the mid-19th century. But it was Cabernet made here in the 1960's by the celebrated Tom McDonald for the Australian wine company McWilliam's (at a winery revived in 1990 by Montana for their Church Road label) that hinted of the long-term promise of the area. When serious planting began in the 1970's Hawkes Bay was a logical place to expand, especially with the Cabernet Sauvignon thqt was then de riguer.
Hawkes Bay has been the Kiwi standard-bearer for claret-style reds ever since, but it was only in the late 1990's that the region begn to make wines that demanded attention. The 1998 vintage, so hot and dry that Hawkes Bay's sheep had to be trucked west over the mountains to greener pastures, produced wines that not only had New Zealand's usual crisp definition, but they were obviously made from fully ripe grapes, and had the gentle but insistent tannins to suggest a serious future.
It was also in the late 1990's that growers begin fully to understand and take advantage of the complexities of Hawkes Bay soils. It had long been obvious that the maritime climate of this wide bay on the east coast of the North Island, sheltered from the westerlies by the Ruahine and Kaweka ranges, could offer one of the country's most favourable combinations of relatively low rainfall and high temperatures (albeit lower than Bordeaux's). What happened underground took longer to understand.
An aerial view of Hawkes Bay vividly shows the remarkable variety of deep glacial and alluvial soils and their distribution in a pattern flowing from mountain to sea. Silt, loams and gravel have very different water-holding capacities, one vineyard can be at saturation point, shooting forth vegetations at an embarrassing rate, while another needs irrigation. It became clear that the ripest grapes were grown on the poorest soils which limited vine growth and on which irrigation could carefully control just how much water each vine received.
There are none poorer than the 1,500 acres (600 ha) of deep, warm shingle that remain where the Gimblett Road now runs, northwest of Flaxmere, along what was the course of the Ngaruroro River until a dramatic flood in 1870. The late 1990's saw a viticultural land grab on these so-called Gimblett, or Twyford, gravels, a frenzy during which the last three-quarters of available land was bought and planted.
Other fine areas for ripening red Bordeaux grapes include Bridge Pa just south of and slightly cooler than here, selected sites on the limestone hills of Havelock North such as that colonized by Te Mata early on, and a cool, late-ripening strip of shingle along the coast between Haumona and Te Awanga.

New Zealand suffered excessive Cabernet Sauvignon worship like everywhere else in the 1980's, but even in Hawkes Bay this variety cannot always be relied upon to ripen fully and plantings of the much more reliable, earlier-ripening Merlot have been increasing significantly. Malbec thrives here and ripens even earlier, although it is prone to poor fruit set. When Cabernet Franc is good it is very good. Like Bordeaux, this is a region of exaggerated annual variation, and for much the same reasons as in Bordeaux, most of Hawkes Bay's best-balanced reds are sensitively oaked blends.
Although the Chardonnay crown has been ceded to, or at least claimed by, Gisborne, Chardonnay is still Hawkes Bay's most planted grape variety, making some of New Zealand's most opulent white wines. And the Sauvignon Blancs produced here are big enough to take happily to oak ageing.