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. They will invariably 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. 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 from producers like Martinborough Vineyards, Fromms, Ata Rangi, Pegasus Bay, Dry River, Palliser and Giesen 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 was 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 1996 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 mouthfilling fruit. Burgundy – or pinot noir – is almost empirically inconsistent. Of all the red wines, it doesn’t just require hands-on winemaking techniques, it demands them. It’s the most labour-intensive wine you can make and the range of techniques available to its makers, in both the vineyard and the winery, is almost infinite. But more crucially, pinot makers must live with the reality that the variation in climate from vintage to vintage actually dictates more about the wine style than any personal decision they could ever make. It’s a fact that the best pinot noirs are borne of cooler climates, those most likely to lack consistency from one year to the next. This is where New Zealand’s Martinborough district is streets ahead, according to Clive Paton, winemaker and part-owner of Ata Rangi, one of NZ’s pace-setters with pinot noir. ‘Martinborough is far enough south to give us great fruit flavour and enough ripeness for strong natural alcohols to create wines big enough to be called great wines. Looking at recent vintages, few have been adversely affected by poor weather conditions.’ 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 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 price 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. The Martinborough Vineyard 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. McKenna makes his pinot noir 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.’ Larry McKenna recognises he 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.’
