To prefer pinot noir to every other wine is to transcend mere national boundaries. Serious pinot drinkers couldn’t give a fig where it comes from, as long as it’s serious pinot. Instead, they adopt a global view. Invariably they register supreme delight to discover that certain wineries in our corner of the world are actually making pinot more serious than most of us thought possible, even if they’re not exactly located in Australia. Says Larry McKenna, winemaker and chief executive of Martinborough Vineyards, south island, New Zealand: ‘If people think Australia is becoming the next Burgundy, they had better come and have a good look at what New Zealand is doing.’ He’s dead right. New Zealand pinot noir has suddenly become very serious indeed. Despite the noble ideals with which I began, some may take umbrage that McKenna, today lionised as the king pin behind New Zealand’s giant advances with pinot noir, is not only Adelaide born and bred, but studied winemaking at Roseworthy College. Furthermore, in his second incarnation as the Jona Lomu of New Zealand wine, some may fail to understand how he could switch his allegiances to the All Blacks and, on occasions, even perform the Haka. Far be it for me to encourage such ungenerous thoughts… The salient facts are these. The current wave of top New Zealand pinots fit comfortably between the best in Australia – with Bass Phillip as the only consistent exception – and very good Burgundy. Wines like the Martinborough Vineyard Reserves 1994 and 1991 and ‘standard’ 1994, the Fromms La Strada Reserve 1994, Ata Rangi 1994, Pegasus Bay Unfiltered 1995 and Giesen Reserve 1994 form a collective so formidable and so classically structured than even the most committed Francophile could be forgiven for not setting them aside amid a line-up of top Burgundy. Given that New Zealand’s first genuinely varietal pinot noir was only made by Danny Schuster at St Helena (Canterbury) in 1982 and that very little happened until those of Martinborough Vineyards and Ata Rangi in 1986, the achievement is remarkable. More incredible still, 1994 is the first serious vintage for most of the top bracket of New Zealand’s pinot makers. The confronting reality is that for most of them, the journey has only just begun. ‘We’re only interested in making pinot noir as very serious red wine, not as something lighter than cabernet’, says Larry McKenna. ‘My focus at the moment is texture, structure and the tannin backbone – those molecules which a lot of the flavour hangs from. Pinots without structure lack texture and longevity. And as much as it is about flavour, pinot is about all those textural attributes that people enjoy – that silky, soft suppleness.’ Serious Australian pinot noir makers have similar ambitions, but the more you taste of the best New Zealand wines, from 1994 and 1995 especially, the more their edge becomes apparent. What sets them apart is that most difficult of aspects to achieve with pinot noir: a pure, intense, complex, multi-layered, velvet-smooth and fully ripened concentration of sheer mouthfilling fruit. Setting the Vineyard Right Viticulturally speaking, New Zealand is no Cote de Nuits, but neither is anywhere else. While its climate is almost uniformly cool and suited to pinot noir, the challenges facing the grower are legion. New Zealand pinot must be worked in the vineyard hard to offset wildly excessive foliage, requires unusual steps to ripen fruit without excessively vegetal characters in its wine and malic acid levels well above desirable levels. It will struggle to reach full physiological (flavour related) ripeness, although it may still accumulate sufficient sugar in good seasons. To kerb its vigour, New Zealand pinot must also grow in poor soils. ‘In a marginal climate pinot noir needs every leaf to be working and every bunch fully exposed’, says McKenna. ‘It’s all about balancing the site and trellis design’, says McKenna, who leaves a deliberately excessive number of fruiting buds on the vine when pruning, restricting its tendency to produce excessive foliage. 40 buds per vine are likely to produce around 70 bunches per vine, roughly equivalent to a yield of seven tonnes per hectare, diverting much of the vine’s energy towards fruit production. Thinning the crop later reduces yield to a desirable, balanced level of around five tonnes per hectare. Today leaf plucking is a refined art form in New Zealand. Reducing leaf area not only improves ripe flavours and reduces the herbaceous tastes in wine, but bunches exposed to the sun acquire more colour and more skin toughness, equating to better tannins and more resistance to disease. One of New Zealand’s greatest advantages is that it rarely, if ever, gets hot enough to damage ripening fruit through sunburn, an issue of concern in all but the coolest of Australian wine regions. Shaded pinot has less colour and more malic acid than exposed fruit, which McKenna correlates with greenish ‘under-ripe’ tastes and high levels of malic acid. ‘By metabolising the malic acid to tartaric acid on the vine we get a riper tasting and better balanced wine, especially after the secondary fermentation has converted the malic acid to lactic acid’, he says. Although he concedes it’s harder to identify malolactic flavours in pinot noir, McKenna says that because they are simply so obvious when excessive in chardonnay, they must also be present in pinot noir grown in similar conditions. McKenna believes that regardless of how ripe it may be, New Zealand pinot noir will always be harvested some degree of herbaceousness. ‘It’s only a theory of mine, but part of the fungal, forest floor characters of Burgundy actually relate to herbaceousness at very low levels. In the past we haven’t got rid of enough of it and our wines have been herbaceous to a fault. But today we are getting it under control’, he says. It’s commonly held that as pinot noir ripens on the vine its flavours develop from strawberry to raspberry, to cherry, then to black cherry and plum. To avoid making lightweight strawberry wines, McKenna attempts to harvest only in the black cherry/plum range. Over-ripe fruit, he says, produces cassis-like flavours, which while suitable for merlot and shiraz or cabernet, are all wrong for pinot noir. New Zealand pinot noir only ripens fully at comparatively high sugar levels – a phenomenon it shares with Burgundy – so it’s crucial that growers leave the fruit on the vines for as long as possible. That said, it’s quite legal in New Zealand to chapitalise, a process whereby sugar is added throughout the fermentation, increasing final alcohol strength and extending the fermentation process. A Focus on Structure ‘Any mug can make a decent wine from cabernet sauvignon’ jokes Larry McKenna, almost. He points to cabernet’s small berries, with its high ratio of surface area to volume, thick skins and loose bunches. ‘Pinot has bigger berries, thin skins and tight bunches which don’t get good maturity of anthocyanins and are prone to disease. Pinot growers know a lot more about how to fully extract colour, flavour and anthocyanins from the skins, which is where red wine starts from.’ McKenna handles 60 tonnes of pinot noir each year in about 30 separate two-tonne parcels, each of which are fermented and treated separately. He regularly macerates fruit in the winery before and after fermentation, saying the times involved are ‘all over the place’ for the different batches. If there’s a danger, he says, it’s over-extraction, which gives clumsy and unbalanced wines. Whole bunch fermentation is an age-old technique employed to a greater or lesser degree with pinot noir, which McKenna says if properly managed and balanced creates interesting long living wines with a lot more tannins and structure and a more stable colour. ‘When I first started playing with it we expected a lack of colour, but we actually found we achieved by far the best colours this way. The only way I can explain it is that we must be extracting more tannins from the stalks and that those tannin molecules are complexing with other molecules to make a more stable wine.’ Sometimes McKenna detects a herbaceous edge – which he describes as ‘tomato stalk’ on the palate – derived from whole bunch fermentation. By working in the vineyard to develop smaller grapes with thicker skins, McKenna hopes he can rely less in future on stalk tannins for the structure and stability of his wines. Wood and skin tannins are of high quality, he says, but stalk tannins must be treated with a lot of care. ‘I imagine they’re bigger, more aggressive molecules with more green flavours’, he says. ‘Skin tannins contribute to the roundness, softness and subtlety of great Burgundies.’ Larry McKenna recognises he has only just embarked on an endless journey. ‘It’s taken ten years to learn what the vineyards have given us and what the different clones have given us. We’ve got the new Dijon (Burgundy) clones coming on over next five years – that’s a whole new area we haven’t explored – and now we are understanding our site and our current clones a lot better and are learning how to manage them’, he says. ‘Learning to make pinot noir is like opening a door just to find you’ve opened up another corridor of twenty doors, each of which need exploring. It’s very annoying, but it’s a lot of fun. If we had opened up all the doors by now, life would be pretty dull.’ THE MARTINBOROUGH VINEYARD Today Martinborough produces around 60 tonnes of pinot noir, sourced roughly evenly from two contract growers and the estate’s own vineyard, which roughly equates to 5% of the entire New Zealand production of dry red pinot noir. McKenna ferments every block and every clone separately, keeping them apart in oak, before culling any not up to standard or isolating components of a possible reserve wine, provided the regular label would still maintain its standard. No reserve was made in 1995 and some was sold in bulk. Martinborough Vineyard presently has a 10,000 case winery and although it is replacing some of its other varieties for more pinot noir, McKenna doesn’t want to see total production expand much further. A new barrel room is under construction especially for pinot noir with a maximum capacity of 100 tonnes. Only ten barrels were made of the 1991 Reserve Pinot Noir (making just over 200 cases), while twice that quantity was made of the brilliant 1994 Reserve. McKenna hope to increase his production of reserve with more experience and older vines. Reserve wines receive 50% of new oak, above the 30% new oak given to the regular label. THE MARTINBOROUGH REGION When Larry McKenna arrived at the tiny Martinborough region for the 1986 vintage after a six-year spell with Delegats in Auckland, the only other wineries in the region were Ata Rangi, Dry River and Chifney. Although accounting for a mere 1.2% of New Zealand’s total production, Martinborough’s 1,000 tonne grape harvest today captures a disproportion level of attention. With Martinborough Vineyards, Ata Rangi, Palliser and Dry River, Martinborough has the greatest concentration of premium New Zealand makers of pinot noir. Its latitude is similar to Launceston, while its soils are gravelly alluvial silts over free draining gravels. Poor for other agricultural purposes but ideally suited to ensuring that pinot noir vines remain as stressed as possible, Martinborough’s soils are just the sort McKenna says a farmer would give to a son-in-law as a wedding present. But they’ve increased sixfold in value since 1980. Martinborough’s HDD summation of 1100 is almost identical to Dijon in Burgundy. 1992 and 1993 were especially cool – McKenna says they were both affected by the volcanic eruptions of Mount Pinitubo – preventing the vineyards from achieving full physiological ripeness in those seasons.
