The flight from London to New Zealand is the closest I will
ever come to intergalactic travel. On my last trip I stayed for 4 days. After a
weekend in the air, the plane touched down in Queenstown late on a Sunday
afternoon. Saturday had been lost, light turned into darkness, 24hrs whittled
down into a quick bowl of soy-drenched noodles in Hong Kong.
At the airport urinals, flanked by two giant Polynesians, the
three of us pressed together like the pipes of a church organ, I pondered Darwin’s
observation that evolution encourages diversity rather than dominance, and that
Nature likes a niche, and one size really doesn’t fit all. I wasn’t built for
oceanic migrations, they weren’t built for airline seats, and all three of us
were too tall to dock effectively with the low-slung porcelain bowls in front
of us. The man to the right of me seemed intent on making a particularly personal
statement about the shortcomings of standardisation by recklessly hosing my
hand-luggage. The horror!
Queenstown offers geography in the raw: mountains, lakes, rivers,
lenticular clouds and adrenaline-filled rides between them; but most
importantly, it held out the prospect of sleep. I rolled into bed at 10pm, only
to find that the Boeing’s west-to-east navigation had wedged a void of
space-time between me and unconsciousness. I switched on the AM radio, and caught
the tail-end of some irate exchanges about the Chinese taking Kiwi jobs, and rallying
calls to resist the New World order of slave cities and poorly made white goods.
Calm was restored by a record break, Allan Sherman’s ”Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah” followed by “Big John”. The combination of moribund songs and fury was reminiscent of my childhood. the scene was set for 70s punk to explode into these angry famers' 21st Century lives.
The following day I drove out to Cromwell, past Chard Farm and
through Gibbston Valley. The day’s first visit was Mt Difficulty, where all the
money seemed to have been spent on the smart new canteen. I tried a few uncared
for bottles, ullaged by out of season visitors, but the guy pouring them still seemed
zombified by summer’s mass influx of tasters. When I asked him about oak
handling, he replied that “the wine showed good fruit”; and he reacted to my
question about “malo” by pointing me toward the male loos.
Next-door to Mt. Difficulty is Felton Road, where I was
greeted by the expansive Nigel Greening. Immediately Nigel started referencing France
and Germany, making anecdotal associations between his vineyards and the finest
terroirs of Vosne and the Mosel. One
of his pets, I soon found out, was called “Jancis”. Minimizing degrees of separation
seemed to be at the bottom of nearly everything Nigel said, and after half an
hour I concluded that all Europe had contributed to the making of Felton Road
in one way or another.
Vineyards at Felton Rd are called “blocks”. At Mt Difficulty
the viticulture had been slapdash, whereas the “blocks” were immaculate: shoots
of even length and even vigour carrying similar amounts of crop. Nigel went
into considerable detail about biodynamic production: goats, hawks, cover
crops, preps; yet, as ever, the whole reasoned panoply of self-contained
production seemed at odds with the accompanying
anti-enlightenment yarns about totemic animals. The conversation went from a
reasoned and visible account of the workings of an enclosed agricultural system
to absurd anthroposophical flights of fancy. The goats were doing a good
recycling job, that much I could see, but by the time Nigel had finished I was prepared
for a bleating chorus of Odl-lay odl-lay odl-lay hoo! hoo!
Despite
all of Nigel’s attempts to lock them together like the north and south poles
of a magnet, Otago isn’t Burgundy. The first wine we tried was a Chardonnay.
Someone whose name meant nothing to me had likened this to “Montrachet” I was
told, but it wasn’t. Wild fermentation had supplemented the simple citrus nose
with flavours of yeast and barley. It was a good wine, quite acidulous, and a fitting reward for all the hours
spent in the vineyards. Next we had a
pair of Pinot Noirs, Felton Rd Estate
and Block 5. Nigel got into his
stride about how they had identified thin seams of calcareous gravel within the
schist, and the roots had threaded along these, so despite the fact Bannockburn’s
geology seemed very different from the Côte de Nuits, the cameo appearance of
marl had contrived to make them twins of a sort. As I tasted the wines, Nigel
reiterated the cross-hemispherical connection with an anecdote about draught
horses ploughing la Tâche, but my memories of hideously
extended air travel were all too raw for this.
Otago is cooler and drier than Burgundy, it’s also geologically
younger. At the height of summer the bleached karst scenery of the
Côte d’Or can evoke the Midi, whilst Otago in February still looks periglacial,
with fast moving streams icily under lit by refracted blue/green light. But
stepping out into the late “Central” summer the most striking contrast is not
the landscape but the luminance; New Zealand’s sun seems nearer and hotter,
like the encroaching star of an apocalyptic sci-fi novel.
“Sunlight into Wine” was one of the seminal texts of my MW
studies, and inevitably it influenced my tasting of Felton’s Pinot Noir. Not
only is irradiance 40% higher in Otago than it is in Burgundy, but the lateness
of the harvest means bunches hang in the sunlight for longer. What struck me
about both the Felton Rd and Block 5 was the range of flavours; there
were black fruits, red fruits, rhubarb, citrus, ivy, oak and spice; in fact, if
wine quality was measured by the lexicon of descriptors a single variety could
inspire, then Otago Pinot would be slugging it out with Californian Zinfandel
and Barossa Shiraz for best in show. The contrast with the Côte de Nuits could not be greater. The finest red burgundies show
homogeneity in fruit character, their flavours pretty much tow in the same
direction and the attribution of quality is in part a measure of the intensity
this red fruit element attains; the lasting impression is something like a perfectly
sustained piano note, rather than a damped chord. By contrast, the Block 5 separated into a range of different
flavours, a melange of tart, ripe, overripe and spicy characters that were all vying
for my attention.
Depending on your point of view, a prism either scatters
light into its constituent wavelengths or refocuses them back into a single
beam. Loosely applied, this seems a reasonable analogy for the differences I tasted
between the Pinot Noir of Felton Rd and the wines of Vosne Romanée; viticulture, vinification, elevage, maturation, and polymerisation
act like a lens in Burgundy, drawing everything to a point, whereas at Felton Rd,
the studied application of the same techniques produces a hugely varied palate.
After Felton Road, I called in at Burn Cottage. Where Nigel
had managed to make biodynamics sound like la
dolce vita, Jarryd Connelly played out the role of the ascetic priest:
filthy finger nails, crumpled, his hands buried up to the elbows in preps, he was
some of Kurt Vonnegut’s mud that happened to sit-up. When I first met Jarryd he
was hand-weeding 60,000 vines, though he subsequently sent me an e:mail asking
my thoughts on the potential benefits of weed stress on young vines (There are
none.) The wines are made by Claire
Mulholland and Ted Lemon, a formidable team, and the first vintage of their
Pinot was more subtle than Felton Road’s, though I’m not sure subtlety is what
one should necessarily expect or even strive for in Otago.
Wanaka is more humid than Cromwell, and its rainfall totals
are not dissimilar to Burgundy’s, but the high irradiance levels still rip moisture
out of the soil faster than it can be replenished. Rippon Vineyard borders Lake Wanaka, and the views to Mt Cook arguably make
it the World’s most photogenic vineyard, but don’t be fooled into thinking this idyll
is incapable of doing useful work.
Nick Mills took over Rippon from his pioneering father. Nick worked
a few vintages in Burgundy, and spent long enough at DRC to tell me their viticulture
wasn’t the best he’d seen, though the wines were
something else. Nick wasn’t unctuous; he was spare with his commentary. He gauges how much he needs to tell you from the rigour of your questioning.
Like Burn Cottage and Felton Rd, Rippon is biodynamic, and as part of the tour I
was taken to the estate’s fermenting compost piles; in fact, we spent 40 minutes
with the compost, which made me think that Nick was deliberately trying to
break the spell of the vista. Compost is essential to Rippon, not least because
Nick dry farms the older vineyards. Pinot Noir seems to show at its best when
the supply of water and nutrients is uninterrupted, and the magnitude of the
compost piles proved this balance was hard earned.
Rippon’s Pinot Noir did seem more homogeneous than Felton Rd’s:
it was softer and less exotic; but the preference for one estate over the other
is a matter of individual taste. I liked Nick a lot too. At the end 16,000 miles of travel you need to
be inspired, because you’re a wreck, and Nick did this. After 3 hours at
Rippon, I got back into my car, returned to Queenstown and did what I had
wanted to do for the previous 3 days, slept until morning.
