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[birds chirping]
[woman] Wine is a sort of paradox in our society.
It teaches us patience,
in a world that goes faster and faster,
and where the immediate and the urgent are the law.
It teaches us to make roads,
in a world where we travel without pause.
It teaches us conviviality,
in a world of violence and brutality.
Last, but not least,
in a world which knows everything,
where everything is known, everything is computerized,
wine teaches us about uncertainty.
It reminds us that life is always an uncertainty,
a question without answer.
Wine is the only product in today’s world
with this wonderful uncertainty.
I think it is the honor of our work.
[upbeat music]
[man] Our customers understand that the best white wine
in the world is white Burgundy.
Great white Burgundy is the best white wine in the world.
It’s made from Chardonnay and that’s the benchmark.
But if you say, "I’ve got a wine here
that really tastes like a Meursault
or Puligny-Montrachet or even a Corton-Charlemagne
and it’s a fraction of the price," they will be impressed.
An average, quite good village white Burgundy,
Puligny-Montrachet, or a Chassagne-Montrachet
is gonna be retail, 40, 50, 60 pounds.
Anything from the new world has to match up
to the original classics,
otherwise there’s no point.
And I’ve often, over the past years,
jokingly served the Kumeu River Chardonnay and said,
"What do you think of this?"
and they always think, they always say,
"Oh, it’s white Burgundy
and not quite sure if it’s Meursault or Puligny,
don’t know which grower it’s from."
It actually became a bit of a joke,
’cause whenever I’d serve a white Burgundy to anyone,
they’d say, "Oh, it’s not bloody Kumeu River is it?"
[chuckles]
Eventually, I thought we really must put this to the test,
in an academic blind tasting.
So, I made a list of the most influential people
in the wine trade in London.
That included Neil Martin of the Wine Advocates
and Jancis Robinson,
who’s probably the best-known English wine writer.
Then I thought, "Right, what we’d do is
we’ll have flights of wine,
in each flight there’ll be one Kumeu River wine
and there’ll be four, or five, six white Burgundies
from very famous producers."
And we got everyone seated.
The wines were served completely blind.
I knew Kumeu would do really well,
but the result was fantastic.
[triumphant music]
Because Kumeu kind of really walked it. [chuckles]
[keyboard clicking]
The response in the press was amazing
and people seemed genuinely surprised
that Kumeu River could challenge the big boys,
the real famous names of Burgundy.
So, it was fantastic that it was talked about
all over the wine world.
Be interesting to think about
what the white Burgundy producers thought,
when they saw the results
of white Burgundy versus Kumeu River.
And they’re in such a comfortable position,
they can sell every bottle they make,
whatever quality it is.
So, why should they care, really?
The 5% more thoughtful ones went back to
trying to work out the problems of white Burgundy
and the premature oxidation and things like that.
Well, Matty’s Vineyard is the special one.
It’s named after my late husband and people just love it.
It’s something special and that’s all there is to it.
The best examples of the Chardonnay grape variety
come from its origin, which is Burgundy,
and so white Burgundy, the wines of Puligny-Montrachet,
Chassagne-Montrachet, Corton Charlemagne,
those areas really were inspirational.
Those are obviously the areas
that you draw your inspiration from.
And even though we’re not making white Burgundy,
it’s certainly great to be put amongst those benchmarks
and to be considered on the same table,
the same sort of sphere that those wines are.
The old world reaction
to the new world and New Zealand wine is two-fold.
It’s one of surprise and one of fear.
[sheep bleating]
[man] I know we’ve come a long way,
by the measure that 20 years ago,
if I had a hundred wines to try, 10 or 20,
I wouldn’t even put in my mouth.
I’d smell them or look at the color
and reject them on that basis.
If I could go back into a time machine
and experience the wines,
which I was quite happy to drink then,
I would be shocked, I’m sure, absolutely shocked.
[man] And the industry, like it did for the rest of New Zealand,
was controlled by immigrants that came over,
that were usually making fortified wines,
because the stock we had at that stage
was mainly table grapes.
The consumer market wasn’t really that sophisticated
in the early 70s.
We had varieties like [mumbles]
and Blue Nun, Velluto Rosso, Cooks...,
but obviously everything has to start somewhere.
When I first started in the industry,
all you had to do was tell people what was good,
they went away and believed you.
To be quite honest, the wine produced in ’75,
in New Zealand, was nothing short of garbage.
Early ’80s, it was, yeah, it was house white, house red.
When you went out, there was an awful lot
of horrible, cheap European wine imported,
because it always had that perception of being better.
So, I thought, "Something had to be done."
And then in the early 1980s,
when Michael Brajkovich came back from Australia,
he started making wine that really, it was just so good.
I guess affluence allowed people to jump on a plane
and go to London, and those that came back,
came back with a taste for wine
and it certainly wasn’t sherry in the flagon.
It was something better than that.
And haven’t we come a long way?
I mean, now I sell wine, the sommelier wants to know the pH,
the acid, who made the wine, how it was made,
what hill it came off, and who am I?
[burbling]
[man] My parents were farmers and not particularly good farmers,
’cause they were first-generation farmers,
and like a lot of farmers they were just looking
to diversify into something and it happened to be grapes.
-[dramatic music] -It was a testament
to the stories of idiot farmers and their tenacity,
because the first year was a great drought and high winds
and all the buds were blowing off.
The year after was a flood
and half the vineyard was washed down the river,
so we replanted for the second time.
I think the third vintage was another flood.
You think back on it, a farmer has no other option.
It’s just second nature.
You just go and do it again.
You get beaten up and beaten up.
Learn and do it right the next time.
Very slow learners.
Yeah.
The idea was to grow a little bit wine and make wine,
sell a few bottles, drink a few bottles,
and hopefully enjoy what you’re doing.
When I first met Matty and came to live here,
there was 30 wineries, I think, in New Zealand.
We knew them all.
We helped each other.
Everyone was very friendly.
Nowadays, if I go to a wine function,
I don’t really know hardly anybody,
except all the old people.
I guess the young winemakers who made a difference
were all members of a club called
The Young Winemakers Club.
I remember there was Nick Nobilo, Ross Spence,
Ivan Selak, Joe Babich.
Well-known brands, well-known wine brands
and they used to get together
and bring along exciting bottles from Europe
and analyze them and talk about them
and dream about making similar wines
in this part of the world.
So, that was an inspiration, I think, for many.
The Croatians did have a big impact
on the New Zealand wine industry.
Take my father for instance.
He always told us he had 206 in his pocket
and that’s all he had.
He was 17.
There was no benefits, there’s no nothing.
Unless you worked, you didn’t get anywhere, did you?
I mean, obviously, New Zealand viticulture
is a very new nation, and when I went there in 1990,
the biggest plantings were of Muller-Thurgau,
which is a rubbish grape variety, that there is no point.
Then, I think, people started planting Chardonnay,
Merlot, Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, Pinot Noir,
all in the same vineyard.
Now, nowhere in France,
would they have all those varieties in the same place.
Shiraz’s are terribly difficult to make.
They’re in all schistic rock, which has been turned--
Dr. Meynard Amerine said,
"Young man, I can tell you that New Zealand
makes the best New Zealand wines in the world."
Everybody laughed, everybody laughed.
"You are not France, you are not Germany, you are not Italy.
You must make your own wines, in your own style."
Following Amerine’s advice, we went down the varietal trail,
and we were away laughing,
and the final upshot of that, is that for the first time,
New Zealand, mainly Marlborough, was able to show the world
what Sauvignon Blanc really does taste like.
[slow rhythmic music]
[Campbell] But it was still a gamble.
I mean, one of those varieties that they planted
was Sauvignon Blanc, that had not only never been,
grapes grown in the South Island,
but it was new to New Zealand,
so that was scary stuff,
but the rest, as they say, is history.
I remember when we first planted, in 1979,
and it was a little bit pioneering, to be honest,
planting vines after work and in the weekend
and doing all the labor ourselves.
So in ’78, ’79, probably wouldn’t have been
any more than a couple of hundred hectares,
and now you have a valley of,
end of this year, 27,000 hectares in a
little over 40 years.
It’s an amazing story.
It was very apparent, early on,
when the first wines were produced out of Marlborough,
how good they were.
I mean, they put New Zealand on the map,
fruit from this region here.
[Campbell] Sauvignon’s biggest strength, I think,
is that Mrs. Winebuyer, in Waitrose or Sainsbury’s,
can look at the shelf
and see New Zealand or Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc,
and she has a fair idea of what she’s gonna get
and that wine will deliver most of the time
and that’s a strong thing.
The wines are distinctively different
and pretty good and consistent.
New Zealand wine, in the U. S.,
really was kicked off with Sauvignon Blanc.
So, Cloudy Bay is the name
and people have this name brand recognition factor, I think,
in how they enjoy it.
[liquid burbling]
The very first time
I tasted Sauvignon Blanc in New Zealand,
I realized that I was in the right place, at the right time.
I was in charge of winemaking at Cloudy Bay for 25 years.
The juice was just so intensely fruit flavored, that I was,
it was incredibly intense.
I’d never seen anything like it,
and I guess when we started building Cloudy Bay,
I knew that the potential was there
to make really great wine,
and we all felt very confident about what we were doing,
but none of us had any idea what we were creating back then.
It was just a bunch of guys trying to make decent wine,
and it’s now a globally-know label.
It’s just incredible.
David Hohnen always said that it was a bit of a fad,
and that we should be prepared for the days
when Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc wasn’t flavor of the month,
but it’s still flavor of the month.
Fantastic years, it was a small crew, [chuckles]
only three or four to start with
and it was great vision from David Hohnen,
who was the founder.
People were making Sauvignon Blanc here,
but they just took it to a new level.
It was just a completely different wine.
It was just, quality-wise, it went from there to there.
Sauvignon Blanc has been the lead variety,
in the global markets, for a lot of good reasons.
It’s particularly intense and unique
and compelling as a wine style,
and it’s done amazingly well
and now really has achieved global reach.
So that’s been fantastic.
The nice thing about our Marlborough wines,
is there is a point of difference,
when it comes to old world versus new world.
I talk about wines from Marlborough, about the blue sky,
the green grass, the cold water, the purity,
the fact that the wines have flavor,
a flavor that is true to the region.
When you bite into the bunch of grapes,
and you taste the Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, for example,
it’s just like what you smell and taste in the glass.
Yes, I remember the first glass
of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc,
the acidity was just so bright and vibrant and in your face,
and to get that kind of vibrancy and power in a glass
is quite remarkable.
An element in the soil there, the methoxypyridine,
gives a intense vegetable touch to grapes
and it marries in perfectly.
It’s the one aspect of the soil,
it gives Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc
that little extra zing,
that nowhere else in the world can reproduce.
This is gonna sound slightly crass,
but it’s a gateway drug for Bacardi Breezer drinkers,
to get into the wine industry.
It’s meant to be a bit of a joke, right?
But, indeed, it has attracted so many new drinkers
into the world of wine, into exploring wine,
because of its accessible nature
and because it’s readily identifiable in a glass.
Sauvignon Blanc’s has been amazing
for this country though,
because it has opened the world’s eyes
to wines of New Zealand.
So, the really important thing now is to show the world
that we’re not just about Sauvignon Blanc, that what,
other things happen in this country are incredibly special.
A lot that works, alongside Sauvignon Blanc
as the door opener to the New Zealand wine story.
[motor rumbling]
In just 20 years, from scratch,
they’ve developed such a following
for their particularly fruity style
of razor-sharp Sauvignon Blanc,
that they reckon they’re the only new world wine producers
actually beating the French at their own game.
I remember seeing a TV series
that Jancis Robinson made in the ’90s,
where she was talking about this New Zealand Sauvignon,
this bright new thing on the world stage,
and she had an interview with Didier Dagueneau,
the famous Pouilly-Fume producer,
and she showed him a Marlborough Sauvignon,
which he tried and then promptly left his house
and went and spat it out on the driveway,
which was pretty funny. [laughs]
There are some wines that might be great,
but I’ll have a sip and that’d be enough.
As an example, off the record, Sauvignon Blanc,
can’t stand it.
[dramatic music]
Being so reliant on Sauvignon,
particularly from Marlborough, in the world market,
-I guess is quite dangerous. -[dramatic music]
If the market changes and we all, well,
some of us remember the grape variety Muller-Thurgau,
in New Zealand, which comprised pretty close
to 50% of plantings, in the late ’70s, early ’80s,
now doesn’t even exist.
Was asked the question, in London,
by a well-known wine writer, saying,
"How long has Sauvignon Blanc got to go
and when is the Sauvignon bubble going to burst?"
I think there is a danger in having one wine style
being 90% of our wine story overseas.
It’s probably just an indication of how young
and un-evolved our country is.
I do hear that for Marlborough to be relying so heavily
on one variety of grape is a danger,
but I think you probably need to get that in perspective,
in the sense that here,
there’s around about 28,000 hectares of vines,
and I guess 80% of that would be Sauvignon Blanc,
and when you compare that to somewhere like Champagne,
which is the legal area for growing grapes in Champagne
is 55,000 hectares and there’s a shortage of Champagne
in the world.
The world’s a big place.
If you look out there, pretty much all of Marlborough
is planted in grapes
and there is a market, internationally,
for the style of wine that we make here,
and I don’t see any danger at all in that, I really don’t.
[bright music]
We have been traveling all over the world,
to show our specificities in our wines.
While we were visiting these countries,
we decided to visit also the wine regions
of each of those countries.
Everywhere we have a distributor for our Sancerre.
That was back in 1998, we visited New Zealand
and particularly Marlborough,
which is probably another kingdom
of the Sauvignon Blanc red variety.
We quickly noticed that this place
is going to be a very special place,
where we can grow Sauvignon Blanc
according to our philosophy.
First of all, we noticed that
thanks to the different valleys
and the presence of the river,
that this place already had the best ingredients,
to be able to have good terroir.
The whole adventure started in 2000,
when we purchased naked land.
It was a pasture, it was a hill,
where the sheep were eating the grass,
and we felt it could be a very good place.
I’ve known the Bourgeois family from Sancerre
for a few years before I came here, 12 years ago,
and they knew I was keen to go to New Zealand,
live in New Zealand.
I mean, in France, you can perpetrate the history,
but the beauty of here is that
it could become another little France,
in a different way, with different terroir,
but that’s what makes it exciting,
and the beauty here is that we can create history, you know?
In France, it’s hard to recreate the history,
you perpetrate it.
Here, you can be part of a new story,
which is quite a privilege and quite exciting.
In New Zealand, when we decided to plant Sauvignon Blanc,
we actually wanted to plant our Sauvignon Blanc
on different terroir,
so we decided to make different Cuvees,
according to the soil type, exactly like in Sancerre.
What we are looking for, as a French producer,
in a Sauvignon Blanc; elegance, nice minerality.
We get this very direct mineral character.
A bit like the limestone we would have here in Sancerre,
but it’s a particular taste,
and very specific from this part of Marlborough.
The greywacke soil is a bit like
in Chateauneuf-du-Pape, in France.
The Rhone River has moved 500 meters from its bed,
over the time, so it’s exactly the same.
The Wairau River also has moved,
and we planted the vines on this very stony soil.
You kind of get the wisdom or the expertise from France
and apply to a new blank canvas, if I can say the way.
It’s kind of the best of both worlds in a way.
They have never done a vintage without them here,
and I’ll tell you what,
this is a little thing that makes a difference,
because you’re growing a vineyard,
and you taste Sauvignon with them
and there’s a whole different world
of understanding Sauvignon.
I’ve seen them coming out here and say,
"What is the forecast?"
I say, "Its brilliant, it’s gonna be sunny,
"and we need some wine."
Have you ever heard a winemaker in Marlborough saying that?
It’ll get a bit more juicy, and then we pick it
and these wines are gonna be a lot more alive.
You don’t learn that at school.
You know, like?
[upbeat music]
When I first came to visit Marlborough in 1978,
where I was immediately convinced
that this had to be the district to produce quality wine.
The land prices were extremely cheap, about $700 an acre.
Coming from Champagne, that was ridiculous.
So we have a project,
of investing into new vineyards abroad.
Of course, New Zealand is one of the destinations,
the location that is on the top of the list.
Now, the definition of terroir varies,
depending where you are.
Not everyone has the same.
Terroir, to me, is a sort of a snobbish French term.
They think that they,
that no one else in the world has terroir.
Every vineyard patch in the world has its own terroir,
because terroir, what is it?
It’s a combination of vineyard sites, soils, temperature,
climate, wind, all that, humidity, rain.
Plus of course, probably the most important aspect
is the human aspect of terroir,
the people who work the land
and the people who make the wine.
At the end of the day, it goes like this...
[foliage rustling]
and you smell this, [sniffs]
and that’s what you smell in the glass.
Yes, it’s beautiful.
Look at that soil. It’s treasure.
If you have the right land and the right grape variety,
with the right climate, then of course,
the combination of this
is going to give something wonderful.
So the terroir is something, that to me,
is absolutely necessary.
Without the terroir, you can’t produce great wine,
and then this is necessary, but not sufficient,
you need to have the great winemaker,
the great vintner, as well, to reveal this terroir.
I think a lot of people in New Zealand
don’t quite recognize that we have terroir,
here in New Zealand as well, in the form of turangawaewae.
Turangawaewae is a place you stand,
it’s all about the physical and the environment,
all the way down to the individual,
rather than the individual’s impact on it.
[slow rhythmic music]
You have an energy and a feeling when you walk onto properties,
particularly biodynamic and organic farms in New Zealand,
not necessarily even in viticulture,
but there is something special here.
It’s that turangawaewae.
Yeah, turangawaewae.
-Yeah. -Exactly.
I think it does come from our Maori heritage,
where we all recognize that you should only take
from the land what you need and can consume,
and as the old tradition is,
the first fish you catch, you put it back,
and in doing that, you learn to respect nature.
I think it’s really important
to understand that time is important,
to understand the terroir,
how to channel the way we make wine,
vinification also has changed a lot,
but we need to adapt to the weather,
to the climate, to the people.
So it takes time.
It’s a lot about time.
Aubert de Villaine from Romanée-Conti
first came here about three years ago, I think,
when he was pushing, along with other people,
to have Burgundy recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
That application was based
on their understanding of terroir,
and he felt that we were developing
the same kind of understanding of terroir,
and he came to New Zealand to see if, as a region,
we would support them in their application.
We did and they are now a World Heritage Site.
[bright music]
[Steve Smith] But if you think about why a vine exists.
A vine doesn’t exist to make wine.
It simply exists to produce fruit that gets sweet enough
and delicious enough for a bird to eat it
and for that bird to take the seed away
and to spread that vine.
That’s why it exists, no other reason.
So if you’re in a marginal climate,
you have to concentrate all of your energy,
if you’re a vine,
in making sure that that berry is ripe enough
to attract a bird.
Whereas, if you’re in an easy place,
it just doesn’t worry about it.
So if it has to try really hard,
then the character that goes into that grape
is gonna be much more than a grape
that grows in an easy place.
I’ve never described it like that before,
that’s the first time I’ve done it.
The big thing that we understood was,
you’re looking for a treasure map.
You’ve-- Somewhere out here, that will be the magic place,
the grand cru’s site that is going to be magic,
but nobody knew what they were looking for.
The interesting comparison between French terroir
and New Zealand terroir, is that New Zealand is an island
and France is a continent,
and with the influence of the sea,
we also get the salinity and the aroma as well.
[waves crashing]
Once you know what grape variety you want,
then you look for the right kind of soil to plant that on,
and you look for a climate,
which is this sort of cultivable limit
where you can only just get it ripe,
with exigent viticulture and low yields
and ideally vine age and a good season.
We weren’t ever trying to ape Burgundy.
It wasn’t that we wanted to make wine
that tasted like Burgundy or smelled like Burgundy.
We have only ever wanted to make a wine,
which is true to its own place,
but I think you’re silly if you turn your back
on 800 years of knowledge and experience,
and the Burgundians have that with Pinot.
So there are things to learn,
and then you apply that to wherever you find yourself.
The soils here are this unique combination
of clay and limestone, that is very, very hard to find
anywhere else in the world,
outside the grape vineyards of Burgundy,
if you’re wanting to grow Pinot Noir and Chardonnays.
We had to do really, really intensive soil research,
and Mike spent a lot of time, eight years, looking globally,
to find this site, and working with universities
and soil specialists in Burgundy,
trying to decipher what areas of this farm would give us
that really kind of grand cru status.
I looked in California and Oregon,
and I looked in Australia, and I looked in New Mexico,
and I looked at Portugal.
I looked all over, to try to find a place,
where you would have the right climate
and the right kind of soil for Pinot.
Chardonnay is not as fickle as Pinot.
Pinot’s very, very finicky.
It’s no exaggeration to say that it got to the point,
after years of going all over the world looking,
and you have to remember this was preinternet,
so I would go the library
and pour over geological maps and climatological data,
and I’d looked all over New Zealand
and couldn’t find what I was after,
and it got to the point
where I was literally looking at maps of Uruguay, at night,
and Claudia was looking at divorce proceedings,
because everybody had just given up on me,
and we’d been sending soil samples from everywhere,
back to friends of mine, who are consultants
-in Burgundy, -[liquid burbling]
and they kept saying the same thing.
"It doesn’t have for us,
what we would hope to see in a great Pinot soil."
And finally, before we gave up option on the property,
I sent them a last soil sample, and they wrote,
"This is what you should be looking for
and it’s finally all there."
If we’d found exactly the right conditions,
in 20 kilometers outside of Detroit,
we might be living in a caravan near Detroit,
but how lucky are we, that it ended up being here,
because it’s such a lovely place, and we love New Zealand.
[Smith] That’s what really attracted us,
is this really amazing opportunity,
to create something really distinctive,
from a pretty special piece of land,
that’s almost directly opposite in the world from Burgundy.
[insects chittering]
[dramatic music]
I think climate change is gonna be a game changer,
there’s no question.
It’s hitting the northern hemisphere
to a greater degree than it’s hitting us, yes,
but sone look at the weather patterns,
it’s all over the place, you know?
We’re getting snow down in Central Otago
when there shouldn’t be snow.
You’re getting rain when there shouldn’t be rain,
and it’s not just a matter of everything getting warmer,
it’s this chaotic weather pattern thing
that’s gonna really make a difference.
It worries me, to be honest.
[Judy Finn] I used to think it was my grandchildren
that would suffer it.
I think, before I die, we’re seeing the wet’s wetter,
the dry’s drier, the winds are windier.
It’s extraordinarily terrifying, and as a race,
we’ve got to face up to it and make changes right now.
The effects of climate change here have been graphic,
I think, in our 40 years.
We don’t appear to be getting the frosts we did,
back when we started in the business here.
It’s become more of a temperate climate,
but I think the climate’s gonna get better for grapes.
Yeah, I mean, there’s certainly a theory
that as the world becomes hotter,
the vineyards might have to shift further north in Europe
and further south in the southern hemisphere,
because acidity is a very important part of winemaking,
and you can’t make great wine somewhere that’s too hot.
So, the great thing about New Zealand,
is there’s a long ripening season.
It’s not really hot, but it’s really sunny.
So, the most exciting thing about New Zealand wines, for me,
is that they have a lot of natural acidity and freshness,
but they get their ripeness without being overripe.
So I think the climate in New Zealand
is very interesting for that.
Felton Road has been biodynamic now since about 2004.
It was organic since about 2001,
and what we’re interested in,
is the idea of creating a self-contained ecosystem,
that is completely nourished from inside the gate,
everywhere from the bacteria,
right down in the lower levels of the soil,
right up to the human beings that work on the site.
90% of the biomass of the vineyards,
so this is 90% of life, by weight,
and also almost all of the diversity of life in a vineyard
is from the soil surface down.
[Greening] So we see the land as an integrated ecosystem,
and it’s our job to see every layer of that is healthy.
This is the virtue of biodynamics,
is that you farm your soil first,
and if you get the soil right,
then the plant will follow
and the fruit will follow and everything else will follow.
And we’re not trying to do that
through weirdness or witchcraft.
What we’re trying to do, is to understand
the way that all these species inter-relate,
and the more we learn
-how those work, -[cow mooing]
the more we learn how we can negotiate with them,
instead of taking them on in battles.
[Gill] Practicing organics and biodynamics,
the preparations you use,
and how you control pests and diseases is one thing,
but the other part of it,
is just being in the vineyard and really closely interacting
with the vineyard and the grapes.
Burn Cottage was the first place that had actually set up,
from scratch, with biodynamic and organic,
with the drive to reflect the unique character
of the vineyard, in that way and healthy vineyard,
healthy vines and great wine.
This is called the Voodoo Lounge.
It’s where we make biodynamic preparations,
sacrifice virgins, do all that kind of stuff.
There’s not much on television in Cromwell,
so we need something to do.
You can see in there, you’ve got eggshells.
-[chickens clucking] -They’re from my chickens.
We use those to make something called CPP or barrel compost,
which is made from cow dung from our highland cattle
-that are up on the hills, -[cows mooing]
and we collect the cow dung, put it on the table
and mulch it up with eggshells, with your hands,
to make a nice gooey mess.
Sounds faintly disgusting.
It’s actually quite fun.
Then you bury it in a clay-lined vault.
Oh, God, that’s lovely.
It’s just full of micro-organisms,
just waiting to add to the biodiversity,
at the base levels of the soil.
All the way through the ecosystem,
there’s just of thousands of new bugs and hurds
to come and play with this.
We get asked this question continuously,
by people saying it must be difficult
to grow things biodynamically,
and yet the funny thing is,
that not many people ask us what opportunities we are given
by farming biodynamically.
And when you think of bio meaning life
and dynamic meaning energy,
then you can stop and see that every day,
there is an opportunity to make life work.
So, it gets easy to such a degree
that Annie’s developed a saying and it says,
"We’re farming ease, not fighting dis-ease."
Biodynamics was the first time
anybody tried to create a philosophy of organic farming.
Shortly before then, all farming was organic,
so that was just farming.
Steiner was an eccentric genius.
He believed some deeply weird stuff.
Consistency is the playground of dull minds, you know?
Yeah, he was a bit of a nutter,
but he was a great nutter.
He was our nutter! [laughs]
[Millton] An international wine writer once said
that Millton Chenin Blanc
is some of the best examples in the world,
outside of the Loire Valley, for this variety.
She also did say
that Millton started practicing biodynamics in New Zealand
before it was even heard of in Burgundy.
She’s quite a good friend.
[Alan Brady] Burgundy is the spiritual home of Pinot Noir.
They’ve been doing it a long time.
We have much to learn from them.
What I took, from doing a vintage in France was, firstly,
I think the history, the culture,
and the provenance of it all.
Rarity of a wine is a big thing.
The great wines.
It doesn’t get any better really.
It’s like a piece of art.
A few people that have got a case of this or a case of that.
[Brady] We bought some land at Gibbston,
which was in the middle of nowhere at that time.
There was a lot of skepticism,
most of the expert advice was,
"You can’t grow grapes in Central Otago.
It’s too cold, too far south, too dry, too windy."
Everything was wrong, but I thought it looked pretty similar
to many parts of Europe
that I’d been to geographically, climatically.
Our latitude is 45 degrees south, 45 degrees north,
runs through Bordeaux, so I gave it a go.
I planted half an acre of all sorts of different varieties
and there you go. The rest is history.
I’m a bloody Irishman
and what do we know about growing grapes or making wine?
The geography, everything about this region challenges you,
and I felt very much like the early pioneers had done,
I guess, the gold miners first.
They’re all rugged determined people,
but we started learning.
It was a sharp learning curve, believe me.
[Taylor] I came back here on holiday
and spent some time with Alan Brady, at Gibbston Valley,
where I saw somebody who knew how to sell wine,
maybe even more importantly than making it,
and then when Alan said he was looking for a winemaker,
I thought there’s too much fun not to be had here,
so I came back here for ’93.
I don’t think I’ve ever had as much fun,
as making wine in those early days at Gibbston,
because it hadn’t been done before.
You couldn’t make a mistake.
It’s like being a kid in the sandpit,
just trying different things.
So that was, it was a blast.
Our vines are 12, 13, 14-years old, grown from Burgundy,
in most cases, 20 years or older,
and the older the vines get, we start to understand the soil
and what’s underneath it a little more.
So, I think what I love Pinots,
we don’t know how good it can get yet.
It’s tomorrow, tomorrow’s what I love about Pinot.
[Brady] Stephen Browett came to visit me in ’91, I think it was,
tasted our wines and took a bottle of
1990 Gibbston Valley Pinot back to London with him,
where he had dinner with Jancis and her family.
"Just to say that Steve Browett brought around a bottle
of the 1990 Pinot Noir last night,
and that we all thought it was an absolute star.
I served it with a top Pinot from Alsace,
Zind-Humbrecht Herrenweg 1989,
but I realized I should’ve put a Burgundy beside it,
because it tasted so Burgundian,
savory, earthy, lots of fruit,
but quite a bit of complexity too.
Congratulations."
That fax from Jancis Robinson
was a huge boost for our confidence,
way back then, not just mine,
but for the region.
We all thought that was an amazing thing to happen.
Now we’re in this little bubble of climate,
where Pinot Noir and other cool climate varieties
just do really well.
We all learn a little bit every year.
The vineyards get older, we get older and wiser.
I think everyone’s making just better
and better wines all the time.
I think New Zealand makes better Pinot Noir
than most other places in the world.
They talk about Pinot Noir being the heart-break grape.
It’s very had to get it right
in the vineyard and the winery.
One year, it’s fantastic,
the next year, it’s so difficult,
so it’s a very humble cadre of people
and it’s something that delivers you
a sense of individuality and it also,
you never go to a Cabernet Sauvignon conference,
every three years, there’s a Pinot Noir celebration
and that tells you a little bit about the style of people
who make Pinot.
They tend to be fun, they tend to like the,
they take their wine seriously, but not themselves.
This is it.
Ground zero.
This is all Pinot.
Look, you see, this is fruit, you smell it.
It’s doing what’s called its cold soak,
so it’s not started fermenting properly yet,
but you just look down here and you can see,
there’s the juice,
just below the surface.
[door squeaking]
So, this is the winery library.
Every wine we’ve ever made is in here,
going right back to the beginning,
1997 Pinot Noir.
The last bottle of ’97 Pinot I had was in Burgundy,
at a dinner, about a year ago,
with about seven or eight friends.
We opened a lot of good bottles that night
and a couple of people said
it was their favorite wine of the night.
[liquid burbling]
I was lucky, because when I started
getting interested in wine,
really good Burgundy was not expensive.
I remember the first time I took wine to sell in the UK,
one of those guys, Bill Baker,
poured me a Richebourg from mid ’70s,
and pointed out that it had cost him less
than the stuff he was gonna be buying from me. [chuckles]
One of the greatest moments for wine, for me,
and this is an easy thing to say,
it was a Le Montrachet from Domain Romanée-Conti.
I had the opportunity of being given
half a bottle of that, in Provence.
I was working in the mud, making rosé.
It wasn’t a very sublime experience,
until the owners of the domain had opened this bottle
and thought I would like to try it.
And so, I quietly took myself away, out of the rain,
sat behind a shed and quietly drank
half a bottle of Le Montrachet,
and they talk about having to do that on bended knee.
I wasn’t on the bended knee,
but it felt like I should’ve been.
[Clive Paton] In 1979, I was aware of a scientific report
that was done on the potential of Martinborough,
as a grape growing area.
It was really highlighting the potential for Pinot Noir,
which I was interested in.
Everything sort of looked quite good.
We didn’t know at the time how good it would be.
One of our favorite clones, which we use,
comes from Romanée-Conti, either La Tache,
Romanée-Conti itself.
-[bell ringing] -[birds chirping]
[dramatic music]
Abel, as a story, is a fantastic story.
The Abel clone is one of the legends
of New Zealand viticulture.
Reputedly it comes from Romanée-Conti.
[birds chirping]
I’ve got good friends at Romanée-Conti,
but I’m always reluctant to answer questions.
[Donaldson] A guy that’s interested in wine jumps the fence in France,
rolls up some prunings, steals some prunings,
rolls it up in some wet newspaper
and sticks it in his Red Band gumboots
and comes back to New Zealand.
The Abel clone was originally intercepted in Auckland
by Malcolm Abel, a Customs Officer.
[Paton] Malcolm Abel, who was also a winemaker in Auckland,
near the Brajkovichs, happened to be the only person
in New Zealand who knew the significance,
so he duly, as a good Customs Officer,
put them into quarantine, then,
because there was no interest in Pinot Noir
in New Zealand at that point,
he was able to take them from quarantine
and propagate them himself.
So, just a fluke. [laughs]
So if Malcolm hadn’t been working that night,
it could all have been different.
So we got lucky.
[McKenna] We’ve taken some of the Abel clone from Atarangi
and planted it here.
It’s a superior clone.
I would say it’s an A-class clone, yes.
We are very happy with the results. [laughs]
[people laughing]
This is the Abel clone and my precious, precious.
But the other lovely story,
is when Aubert came out here.
Somebody had to tell him the Abel story.
So, sure enough, they told him the story,
and he’s made a comment, I wasn’t there,
but he made a comment, something along the lines,
"Well, if this story is true and I’ve heard it before.
All I would like to say is
that you’ve done a very good job with it."
And I think that’s lovely.
Understands a little bit of history
and it is a nod towards the admiration
that we have for some of those fantastic French Burgundies.
-[birds chirping] -[insects chittering]
[man] Have you ever taken a bottle
of your Pinot to Romanée-Conti?
No, I haven’t.
I’m in Burgundy at the moment,
and we’re shooting a documentary,
and I have some premium New Zealand Pinot Noir,
that I’d love to drop off for Aubert and Charles, as a gift.
Okay.
We can go and shoot whatever we want, but apologizes
because they’re doing stock take at the moment,
so it wouldn’t very nice to shoot inside.
Next week, if we wanna come back. [chuckles]
[woman] Oh, my God!
[man] Let’s go, before they change their mind.
-[heavenly music] -[birds chirping]
[Dave] We took a bottle of Atarangi to Romanée-Conti for you.
[Paton] You’re kidding.
-Yes. -Ah, you’re joking.
Wow.
[dramatic music]
[Philippe Blanc] France has been making wine for many, many years.
There is a history of making wines, loving wine,
discovering where good place to make good wine is.
We’re a kind of a leader and a kind of a benchmark.
If you make Bordeaux wines, Bordeaux is the benchmark.
If you make Pinot, Burgundy is the benchmark.
If you make sparkling wine, Champagne is the benchmark.
And the first alcohol I ever tasted
was first growth Bordeauxs,
but the ones that I’ve come to really admire,
as a spring board for what we’re doing,
here at Puriri Hills,
are the ones that you see here.
Places like Angelus, Cheval Blanc.
[Donaldson] You can’t drink some of those
extraordinary bottles of wine,
with hundreds of years of history behind them and not go,
"Oh, my God!
You can do that with Pinot Noir, can you?"
The benchmark and the best examples of Pinot Noir
are certainly from Burgundy,
so that’s everyone’s sort of reference point.
[McKenna] We have certain domains from
Burgundy that we follow, and we like their style,
and we like to see how the vintage impacts
on those wines and really how they’re learning.
They’re learning as they go along.
I think Benjamin La Roux’s a very good example.
Lucien Le Moine, Mongeard-Mugneret,
Grand Cru Batard-Montrachet,
not every day, but certainly this style of wine
is something to aspire to.
We so often use foreign benchmarks as a deity,
and I always see the benchmark tastings
as almost fetishists’ approach to the way wine is looked at.
That you can’t just feel self confidence in your own product
or in your own worth
or in the collective community around you,
seems to be erroneous.
It seems to be something that comes with the territory
of being in the antipodes.
It’s an unusual condition in many respects.
"Why are you trying to imitate Burgundy?"
We’re not trying to imitate Burgundy.
We know we can’t make Burgundian wine in Central Otago.
We make Central Otago Pinot, they make Burgundy Pinot Noir,
but we still love to compare,
and we still appreciate what they achieve with theirs.
It’s kind of interesting when you try to benchmark
perhaps one region against another.
I don’t think it really can be done or should be done.
You can compare wines and say what you prefer,
but each wine is speaking for where it comes from.
[Tony Bish] Whilst we reference Burgundy out of pure enjoyment
and like drinking the wines, when we can afford them,
which is not that often,
we don’t make Burgundy here.
We make Hawkes Bay Chardonnay on our site.
We don’t see them really as benchmarks
in that competitive sense.
We make completely different wines here.
I mean, you can pay homage to famous names,
but it’s really like, what, are you gonna coat tail on that?
To me it’s, why?
I don’t try to make the best.
I try to make very good wines,
then you love them or you don’t love them,
but that’s not that important.
[birds chirping]
[dramatic music]
[man] My family is from the district of Champagne,
a small town called Les Pionniers,
that’s where I come from.
I left in ’75, to come to New Zealand.
My family is still growing the vineyards
and making Champagne today.
Champagne is a king’s drink.
Every times when you have a success,
not only in the business, but in the family,
you open a bottle of Champagne.
And Champagne, it’s like Paris, it’s like France.
[speaking in French]
On, everywhere in the world, now, when you say Champagne,
you have some light interact,
and it’s very important to don’t compare Champagne
with other sparkling wine.
It’s sparkling wine, it’s specific terroir,
specific grape variety, sometimes specific process,
to obtain the sparkling, but it’s okay for me.
[Forsyth] People talk about Champagne with a sense of wonder,
even though they know nothing about wine whatsoever.
We talk about it and look at it and say,
"How does a region
"that’s on the edge of winemaking capabilities,
in terms of climate, in terms of where they are",
they’re the world’s best brand, no question.
Everybody goes to Champagne to celebrate,
and how do we get there?
[Le Brun] In this district, we have all the conditions.
It is, if you like,
similar what Champagne would experience
in a great vintage year.
We have these conditions, year after year.
Therefore, you will always find people
who think Champagne is best
and anything else is a pale imitation,
but the proof of the pudding is in the drinking.
A lot of people recognize that what is produced here
can compare very well, very favorably,
-with Champagne, you know? -[liquid burbling]
I think it’s a good possibility for New Zealand,
with the climate.
The climate, it’s near Champagne climate.
If you try to compare Marlborough and Champagne,
I think you are doing a mistake.
I think what is important,
is to understand and to express your own terroir.
And it’s always interesting to talk to each other,
to understand why we do something,
but never try to replicate everything.
Make your own opinion out of it
and express what you think is good for you.
[man] Look, I think Methode Traditionale from Marlborough
can be as good as Champagne,
but it’ll never be Champagne.
Champagne can only come from Champagne,
but when you look at the quality of the wines
that are coming out from New Zealand,
we’re reaching a really high level,
and I think the challenge for us over the next 20 years,
is to perhaps look at something
that could be considered a real prestige Cuvee,
like a Krug equivalent or something like that.
We haven’t seen that come out of Marlborough yet,
but we have got the potential, for sure.
There was the old ABC movement, anything but Chardonnay.
And a lot of the overly-oaked,
big, fat, malolactic sort of styles
that were being produced 30 years ago,
put a lot of people off.
But, I think now, people are realizing that Chardonnay,
if it’s handled well, in a subtle way,
produces absolute world-class wine.
They gave you a headache.
It was too much oak, it was too much fruit,
everything was laid on with a trowel.
And now, as we’ve refined them,
to the fact that they’re more structured,
they’re more svelte, you can have a second glass.
They age beautifully, they’re just so much more elegant.
Personally, I’m a huge fan of Chardonnay.
It has a complexity, a depth and longevity in the bottle,
that defines it as being the king of the white grapes.
I always maintain Chardonnay, particularly,
is totally underestimated from New Zealand.
Every district in this country’s making one
or two, three exceptional quality Chardonnays,
and they’re being received extremely well offshore,
but also being sold for perhaps half what they’re worth.
A recent visit to Kumeu Estate
reinforces that their Chardonnay is outstanding,
world class, world beating.
An unlikely to produce such a wine, but there it is.
Michael Brajkovich was perhaps an epiphany for me,
that we could make world class Chardonnay in New Zealand.
There’s something that you hear over
and over and over again, and they say,
"Chardonnay is the winemaker’s grape."
Now, the conceit is that Chardonnay,
because it doesn’t have very much varietal character,
is like a blank canvas,
upon which the winemaker, he or she,
can paint their idea,
their vision of what the wine should be.
I think that’s nonsense.
I think that’s utter nonsense.
Chardonnay, at its best, is not an empty canvas.
Chardonnay is a window.
It’s a window that affords a view
of where that wine comes from,
and my job, as a winemaker,
is not to paint my vision of wine.
I just keep the window clean, I just wash the window,
so that the view is as clear as it can possibly be.
And the wines that’ve most inspired me over the years,
are when you’re looking through that window,
and you’re seeing where the wine comes from,
and then somehow, wonderfully, magically,
that window flies open and it’s almost like you’re there,
it’s almost like you can step straight into that vineyard.
[sniffing]
[Robinson] What’s been interesting about today’s tasting,
which had no white Burgundy in it,
it was all Kumeu River.
It showed amazing consistency.
Everything was a very high level
and some of the best wines were 10-years,
sometimes 12-years old, which is fantastic,
because an awful lot of white Burgundies are over the hill,
at, say, five years.
[upbeat music]
[wood clanking]
All of those individual barrels are,
depending on which cooperage they’re from,
they give different characters, so different toast levels,
different forests, that they source the oak
for the barrels from.
They each have their own different characters
and different notes on the nose and different mouth feel
and phenolic characters that they give the wine.
[Dom Maxwell]I love what oak does.
I think the right oak
can just really enhance the raw material that you have,
but you can also get it really wrong.
And so, you’ve got a lot of choices to make.
Where the oak is grown, which will give you
an indication on the grain tightness
which will give you an indication
on the tannin from that oak.
Somebody very important here was saying,
"It’s easy to make a great wine.
Just the 200 first years are difficult."
Well, I can tell you certainly
about the new generation of Chateau Angelus,
the eighth generation.
Chateau Angelus has been in my family since 1782.
We’ve been making wine
in this little village of Chavignol,
for 10 generations, so back in 1692.
We have records in my hometown,
that the first vineyard owned by LeBron
started in 1684.
And it’s something that is quite unique,
to be able to have this very long history,
235 years exactly,
and to continue to perpetrate the tradition and the history.
[De Boüard-Rivoal] When I think of my grandfather’s
and great uncle’s philosophy and vision,
it was totally different.
I mean, Left Bank was really another world to them,
Left Bank of Bordeaux.
Whereas, for us, it’s totally different.
We’re very open minded.
[Blanc] I think we’ve got some assets, but it’s not enough.
You can’t rest on your laurels with that,
you have to keep working.
And the truth of 200 years ago is not the truth of today.
[Millton] It’s interesting, when you talk about
how many generations it takes to make good wine,
and how do you make your succession plan work?
How do you make this continue to happen?
We’ve been here now for four generations.
We hope and pray the fifth generation
is going to be enjoying the same activity.
I think the heritage of the land is quite a big point.
It’s been in my family for a few generations.
I said to Mum one day,
that "I can’t imagine wine not being a part of my life,
"why not make it my whole life?"
And I have not looked back.
When we were young, we would just go wherever they went,
and so our family holidays were loading up the boot
of the old Cortina and going door knocking
at every bottle shop and pub that we could find
in the South Island and selling cases of wine.
That was our youth, yeah.
I am exceptionally proud of what our parents have done,
of the winemaker our father is.
To continue that on,
I think that we’re incredibly fortunate.
[Remy Le Brun] So, it was the first time I’d been back to France
since I was six years old.
As soon as we got to the village our father’s from,
all of a sudden I had this massive overwhelming sensation
of where we’d come from
and what the family history is all about,
and it completely changed my perspective on who I was,
and all of a sudden, I wanted to be a part of it.
New Zealand’s a brave industry,
because we don’t have anything to go on.
People try new things and it’s an exciting future,
to be a part of something that is constantly evolving.
You know what, let’s try Albarino, or let’s try this.
That didn’t work, we’re gonna do it this way.
Organics and biodynamics and this real mind
for sustainability and the environment.
The New Zealand wine history, I’m inspired by enough,
but I would never turn my back on the old world.
[glasses clinking]
We’re a restless young nation, so we’re not gonna sit here
and take three generations to do this stuff.
We can sense our opportunity.
We’re not bound by any tradition.
We’ve got a freedom to do whatever we want,
because of our location on the other side of the world,
we have to think a bit differently.
This idea of how do you make a young vine old?
The French would never have that discussion,
but that’s a discussion that we have here,
not just in viticulture,
but in everything that happens in this country.
Well, we have, in Bordeaux, in Burgundy, in Champagne,
a big challenge, that is
to maintain family business in the family.
The more generations means the more shareholders.
It had been the case, in two very famous estates
in Bordeaux, Cheval Blanc and Yquem.
Too many shareholders.
They couldn’t really organize the management,
so they had to sell, and the other problem
is that the value of land has increased a lot.
Since we have high inheritance taxes in France,
it is difficult to transmit,
because sometimes the families do not have the means
to transmit to the following generations,
which is a big problem.
[upbeat music]
What’d I learn in Burgundy?
I learnt how great cheese was, first, without question.
The monks in Burgundy,
they dedicated their whole lives
to understanding this region, through its wines,
in generation after generation after generation,
so that there’s been a big advantage,
and then stories get built up over time,
so I think time is what Europe’s had on its side.
[birds chirping]
There’s nothing magical
about the great wine regions of the world.
It’s about human hard work
and centuries of it.
[Dean Shaw] Well, in the old world,
I think that their granddad’s
probably done the experiments beforehand.
And they’ll say, "Well, hey, this is what we do
and this is how we do it",
And then you go, "Why?", and they go, "Huh, I dunno."
But I think you sorta take that
a little bit with a grain of salt.
I think they’d have trialed previously,
they’ve just had a longer time to do that.
Interesting thing with being a winemaker,
is you only make wine once a year.
So, a really experienced winemaker,
right through a career may only do their job 40 times.
So, making wine is not like being a chef.
It’s not like, "Hey, I do this 250 times a night
and if I burn the steak, I get another one out."
You can’t make mistakes, but you’re learning all your life,
and even at the end of your life,
you have an awful lot you haven’t learnt.
In wine, a lot of wine growing regions,
where they have five, six, seven generations
in the family, making wine,
there’s a much greater collective knowledge,
because your grandfathers and your fathers can tell you
about the times they made wine.
So, I did my training in Burgundy.
I did a few vintages in Burgundy.
I worked in 2008, I worked in Burgundy.
I worked at Domaine Dujac.
’95, ’96, ’98,
and then Champagne in 2000, ’01 and ’03.
Fantastic place.
Basically went there just to learn from some of the best.
I was their first non-family winemaker
since they were founded in 1795,
so that was a bit of a privilege.
And they told me that I was
the first permanent foreign winemaker
in the region there’d ever been.
So, no pressure.
So, I got the chance in ’97, to finally go to Bordeaux,
and I managed to find a place at Angelus in Saint-Emilion,
which was fantastic,
because it was an up and coming vineyard.
Saint-Emilion has a very similar terroir and soil type,
I think, to Matakana.
So, I managed to pick up
the nickname "L’espion" the spy,
because everywhere I went,
I was taking photos of everything and
because this was my one chance to really find out
exactly how these wines are made.
I mean, obviously, we had our own ideas back in New Zealand,
what they were doing, but this is the primary source.
That time in Burgundy was kind of the time
where I realized that you could take the foot off
your winemaking, and you could have faith in the place
where the grapes grew,
and you can make wine with a light touch,
that’s when the wine really showed its true beauty.
Like I say, what we’ve got is our patch
and let's just express that
and that’s really what it did for me, yeah.
The Burgundians have this expression,
they say, [speaking in French],
and what that means is,
that that smells and tastes like Pinot.
It’s not a compliment,
because if it smells and tastes like Pinot,
you’re missing the point.
It means it doesn’t taste
like Pommard Rugiens
or Bon Marche or Clos de la Roche.
It’s always supposed to about the land,
about the site in the vineyard.
Their Cuvee Aux Antipodes is a collaboration,
between myself and Chambolle-Musigny winemaker
Francois Millet.
So, I suggested to Francois, that he come and make some wine,
and he thought that would be pretty interesting.
I let him choose which part of the vineyard
he wanted to work with and uses that same parcel every year.
And it was really important to me,
that he was able to make the wines exactly how he wants to,
not how I would or anyone else.
So, I went to France
and bought all the same winemaking equipment
he uses in Chambolle-Musigny
and brought it back to New Zealand,
so that he was able to use his very traditional methods,
hand pumps, barrel to barrel racking, and so on.
I guess the most pleasing thing for me was
that he really, really likes them. [chuckles]
That project has been a really cool part
of the history of Central Otago,
that someone of his standing,
he’s obviously a very well-known winemaker,
would come so far away and make wine down here with us
is really cool.
When a Burgundian winemaker comes here
and looks at the viticulture, looks at the winemaking,
they ask a hundred questions, and then they say,
"Oh, you do all the same stuff don’t you?",
because actually what they learn was essentially,
we’ve learnt that that works,
and so yeah, we all do the same stuff. [chuckles]
I don’t think that any of us have got the right to turn up
in anybody else’s region and say,
"You should be making wine like this",
but I think every region has got lessons
to teach everybody else.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
I find it very difficult to say,
"This is the best wine in the world,
or this is the best region in the world."
I think that all of us are just trying
to make the best wine,
from every weather package we get delivered every year.
That’s certainly what we’re trying to do here.
No one’s got a monopoly on knowledge.
[Greening] We’ve really seen, in Burgundy especially,
the advances that the new generations are making.
We now have generations that are being university trained
in viticulture and in winemaking
that are working internationally.
So, they leave university, then they hit the road.
We have an exchange program here, with Burgundy,
so they send their kids to us to be trained,
we send ours to them to be trained.
So, by the time someone has done the round
of three or four countries, got their degree,
they’re hitting the ground
with more knowledge and understanding
than all of the collective generations,
which can annoy their fathers a little bit,
but you’re seeing a transformation in quality
right around the world from that.
There’s only rules and regulations.
For every appellation you have,
about 15 pages of rules and regulations.
We’re not allowed to irrigate, our maximum yield is limited,
our way of pruning, trellising,
acidification, chaptalisation, it’s all regulated,
and there is many, many rules applying to each appellation.
With the protectionism of the appellation, though,
comes this great stack of regulations.
Local vine growers have to restrict themselves
to one of only two permitted grape varieties,
they have to reach certain,
very carefully prescribed minimum ripeness levels,
they’re limited to a certain maximum yield,
they can only pick when the authorities say they can.
Rules are being set,
because some people have made a wrong decision,
you’ve gotta think about that, you know?
History brings you rules, you know?
I have to keep the history of the house,
which is about 200 years of heritage,
which is a huge heritage.
Consistency is about respecting the house style,
but also adapt a style, for example,
what people are expecting now, which is very different
to what they were expecting 200 years ago.
In the early stages of a young region,
the openness and lack of regulation is an advantage.
People need the opportunity to explore
and to really get to know what works
and what’s possible in a place.
Well, the regulations in France
are put there for a reason.
The problem is that when that goes too far,
it means that it stops you being able to do things
that could, at times, be good,
to experiment with things.
[McKenna] We have young European winemakers come here,
and they think they’re in heaven.
We can grow what we think suits the district perfectly
and handle it the best way we can imagine.
I think New Zealand winemakers have a huge advantage
in not having rules about how.
There’s nothing prescriptive.
So, in essence, it opens the door for creativity
which is, in my mind,
the future for the whole world.
You have to be creative.
I think one of the huge tools in modern quality winemaking
is the use of irrigation to control stress levels in vines.
As the drainage is very important,
the roots go deep in the subsoil,
and as we dry farm,
unless it is an extremely dry summer, we do not irrigate.
That’s another particularity of Clos Henri,
and it helps the roots to go and fetch moisture,
but also minerality.
The vines need to survive and we feel in this wine,
that the vines struggle a bit, not too much, no stress,
just struggle to get what it needs.
Particularly, in hot, dry years,
when you can feed a little bit of water to vines
and just keep them ticking over,
so your grapes ripen physiologically,
rather than under stress,
you get more supple characters in the wine
and better aromatics.
We’re allowed all those tools and AOC in France,
they’re not.
Crazy, because those laws were written in the mid-1930s
and technology has left that legislation behind,
but it’s not allowed to be practiced.
Crazy.
People have this perception of irrigation,
but it actually allows us
to turn the vine on and off when we want to,
and I think if some areas of Europe
were able to irrigate, they would be very happy for that.
[cork pops]
[bottle opener rustling]
[laughing]
The screw caps.
I was prepared [laughs] for this.
What’s important, it’s what’s inside the bottle.
It’s shocking, ’99 Chambertin from Rousseau stands out,
and it was hideously corked.
It was Romanée-Conti St. Vivant ’99,
it was that, it was Musigny from Vougeot,
and it was quite a few,
and then just that, the one I was looking forward to
was Rousseau Chambertin, it was hideous.
Life.
2000 Gimblett Gravels Chardonnay.
Once it was bottled, it was a fairly decent run,
I think, 4,000 cases run.
We started to see quite disturbing levels of cork taint
and other issues very early on,
30 to 35, or even 40% of the corks were giving the wine
a musty TCA character,
well past any quality level you’d be happy with.
So we ended up destroying 4,000 cases of wine,
which is a job in itself.
And this was quite motivating,
to move to an alternative closure, as you can understand.
Even a cork that hasn’t got cork taint
still imparts a flavor
and the amount of flavor that they impart to the wine
varies considerably, from cork to cork.
We used to call it "cork bark taste,"
because a cork is a piece of bark and wood tastes like wood.
[chuckles]
Tradition is a funny thing, because it’s fairly obvious
that screw caps are far superior,
in terms of quality and long living our wine,
and yet a lot of people just were quite abusive to us
when we went cork-free.
The only reason that traditional areas
really stick with cylindrical cork closures is tradition
and, dare I say it, snobbism.
It’s not about quality.
It’s about how it appeals to their customers.
And since we use screw caps in most cases,
it’s aging a lot better, certainly the white wines.
Our Chardonnays age way better than most white Burgundies.
Ah, look, I think for white wines, I’m firmly
in the screw cap camp.
Absolutely preserves freshness
and there’s no doubt the wine still develops,
and you can’t stop organic chemistry changing in a bottle.
So, this wine has evolved in a fascinating way,
but that freshness and that vibrancy,
the retention of color,
I put that down to not too much oxygen
coming into the bottle.
And the great thing is,
is I can open another five bottles of this wine,
they’ll all be the same and you cannot get that from cork.
[Judd] The thing that we love most of all
about the screw cap thing, is that we just know
that every single bottle that we open
is gonna be exactly the same.
The consumer is tasting the wine that we made,
not the result of some sort of random maturation process
that’s happened in a glass bottle,
that’s been sealed with a piece of bark.
I remember duck shooting with a good friend of mine,
and we always took turns at taking a vintage port,
and it was his turn to do the vintage port,
and so, when all the beer’s gone,
and we’re in the middle of nowhere
and covered in camo paint and shot gun cartridges everywhere
and are in a hide on a lake,
and he pulls out of this bag,
this bottle of 1927 Pedro Ximenez,
and I said, "Jesus mate, here, now?
He goes, "Absolutely."
We drank a wine from 1927,
and we talked about Spain in 1927,
and what the geo-political situation.
We had no idea, we made it up,
but it was a great conversation about time travel, really.
-Yeah. -And, who picked the grapes?
What would their lifestyle have been?
And imagine if they could see us.
Imagine if those people,
who were involved in growing those grapes
and making that wine could look out of the grave and see us,
in New Zealand, drinking their wine, nearly 100 years later.
I mean, that’s amazing.
So I think there is a poetic nature to wine.
We are drinking 1927.
What is a great wine? What a question.
According to me, there is not one single answer.
There are millions of answers.
It becomes something you think about and talk about,
rather than just being a drink you knock back.
A great wine is something that is very personal,
that is very subjective.
It’s not just about fruit.
Well, a great wine is one that I’m prepared
to pay quite a lot of money for.
Mr. Berwing, Chateau Béatrice,
he always tell me, it doesn’t matter how it tastes,
if the bottle is finished on the table,
it’s a great bottle and, again,
we’re not even talking about price here.
If you can almost stop the conversation, you’re going,
"Hang on a minute, that’s amazing",
and then you can go back to the conversation.
I think wine is about enjoyment.
You like to share enjoyment with your friends.
It’s like the most comfortable lounge chair
you’ve ever sat in.
You can just drink and enjoy it
without thinking about it,
but at the same time, if you want to,
you can sit there and analyze it for hours.
It’s just got a lot of complexity.
I think part of my love for wine
comes from how I can’t help but be taken by it.
Your mind is taken on a journey,
and then you suddenly think,
"Gosh, I haven’t even tasted it yet."
The hairs on the back of your neck go up,
and you’re like, "I wish I made this.
"How do you make this?"
If you have a wine that tastes like where it’s grown,
you’ve really got something unique and special.
The wine that you will remember for the rest of your life.
Without hesitation of a doubt,
the third glass is always better.
-Let me check. -[laughing]
When you go to your cellar,
it’s that one you never really wanna drink,
because it’s also so valuable to you.
Like the greatest wines that I’ve ever tried,
you cannot write a tasting note for,
because you’ve got no idea what to write.
More in metaphoric terms,
music, life, love, ups, downs,
goods, bads, tragedies, delicacies, length, harmony.
As romantic as this is,
it’s this incredible expression of love and subtlety
and harmony and beauty, but all in the senses,
and the idea that so much can be experienced,
just through this purely sensual sensory experience,
is really kind of overwhelming and beautiful.
Well, as I said before,
the Felton Road might be one of my favorite!
[laughs]
First, Ata Rangi 2014.
Kumeu River 2014
Mates Vineyard Chardonnay.
And we’ll start with Trinity Hill, again with Vintage ’15.
As a screw cap, it won’t be corked,
so that’s something we won’t say.
[bright music]
2010 Craggy Range Gimblett Gravels Le Sol.
Dry River.
[speaking French]
-[bottle opener rustling] -[cork popping]
[sniffing]
[liquid sloshing]
Mmm!
So, we’ve got a young, nice color.
Middle, middle dip.
I love the silkiness and elegance of this wine.
Fruity, dark fruit.
Again, very young, but drinkable.
I would give it a little bit of time.
It’s something to be elegant and fine, and here again,
I think, tannins are nice
and that’s the most important thing
for making great red wines.
To me, this one is well balanced.
You know, it’s... [mumbles]
-[man] Good structure? -Yeah.
What would you add?
Off camera, in a blind tasting, I wouldn’t be able to tell
whether it’s New Zealand or northern Rhone.
Congratulations to the producers, and again,
it’s a great pleasure.
If they want to come and visit us,
we’ll take care of them.
You pass the message, thank you.
Can New Zealand be a sort of player in the world stage?
That’s a controversial question. [chuckles]
There’s that old story about asking someone in Bordeaux
of what they thought about Burgundy wines
and the typical answer would be,
"Do they make wine in Burgundy?" [chuckles]
I think Europeans have a bit of a view like that,
that they’re the center of the universe, in terms of wine.
When they look at their sales figures,
they may see that the new world is giving them
a big kick in the pants.
I think there are always people who look to the old world
for the ultimate in quality,
and those people often have very closed minds.
They’re not searching for the new,
and they rely much more on other people’s opinions,
rather than their own.
Will you see New Zealand wines
gaining very, very high prices
or listed at the best restaurants like Bordeaux,
Burgundy, and so on? I think that that would be
interesting to see in the future.
Well, why not?
Every now and then, you taste a great Burgundy
with some age in it and it just blows your mind,
and you know that there nothing like it’s
yet been made in New Zealand,
and you wonder whether it ever will.
On the other hand,
you put your nose in a glass of great New Zealand Pinot Noir
and you’ll see something that you’ll never see in Burgundy.
I think that we can now confidently say
that New Zealand Pinot Noir, in terms of quality,
is up there with anything that’s being produced
anywhere in the world.
I have been banging on, literally for years,
about how Chardonnay is the thing
that New Zealand does best.
No one takes any notice of me because, of course,
they can make money hand-over-fist selling
Sauvignon Blanc.
I think it is without doubt, what,
in the world scheme of things, New Zealand is best at,
and it makes truly fine wine, when it gets it right.
The amount of truly world-beating,
great Sauvignon Blanc coming out of New Zealand,
I would say, is that much
and the amount of truly great world-beating Chardonnay
that’s coming out of New Zealand is, that much.
Possibly that much.
New Zealand’s opportunity lies hugely with Chardonnay,
in the global market.
From where we are today, looking forwards,
our Chardonnays have power, integrity,
precision, and unique characteristics,
that I think are very compelling.
Yeah, Sauvignon Blanc is by far and away the Mr. Big,
so what’s next?
And the knee-jerk answer’s gotta be Pinot Noir.
It may not be in some of our lifetime,
that we are producing these amazing benchmarks,
but we’ve already achieved it with Sauvignon Blanc,
we know that we’ve done that,
and we’re really knocking on the door pretty hard,
with our Pinot Noir.
We’re surprising the world with Chardonnay as well,
so we’re very, very close.
Here’s the thing about New Zealand,
that is different from France,
is that our wines do tend to taste great when they’re young,
whereas their wines, for some reason,
are different from that.
So their wines do take some time to taste great.
I’m not sure if the next generation wants to wait
25 years for a bottle to be beautiful and perfect.
There’s no question that New Zealand wine, right now,
has a seat with the finest,
and the finest are happy to acknowledge
the chair that we occupy.
We don’t quite have the seat at the table yet,
because these traditional areas
have a massive history,
a lot of tradition and a lot of track record,
as far as their wines are concerned,
and we cannot duplicate that.
All we have is the quality of our wines
and in the course of time,
I’m sure we will get there.
I don’t think we’re quite there yet.
The French have a wonderful saying,
"Vive la difference."
So, ours are equally as good,
in terms of the parameters of quality,
but they’re different,
because they’re grown in different soils.
But the nice thing is, go to Bordeaux and take a bottle
and put it up and put up one of theirs,
you get just as much pleasure, but they’re different.
So "Vive la difference." Brilliant.
They don’t want all wine to be the same.
Guys like Larry McKenna and Grant Taylor
give me a sense of developing heritage,
that we’ve built into the Pinot industry,
and I see the young ones coming through,
and I’m very content to, you know, pass it on,
but they have to look after my precious vines.
If you see all the vineyard,
in a beautiful spot in New Zealand,
I think it’s not humble enough to say
we’ll make the best wine in the next five years.
I think you have to let the vine age, let the wine age,
observe what your consumer think of it and it takes time.
One of my goals in doing this,
has been to demonstrate that New Zealand
is capable of competing at the top of the world wine market.
[Bennie] New Zealand wine has a capacity to be
the world’s leading boutique specialist,
wine growing nation.
[Smith] If you look at what our place has,
that other parts of the world don’t have,
is this really unique combination of high UV light,
in combination with relatively high humidity,
cool temperatures, because we’re surrounded by ocean,
so we don’t get the really hot temperatures
that large islands like Australia or continents get,
and those three things together
are like a nirvana for plants.
There’s a freshness and energy to it,
that comes from New Zealand,
because this is the place.
So we have that, that no one else has got.
[Robinson] I wouldn’t say that the world’s most famous producers
have yet recognized how good New Zealand can be.
They will.
Definitely, they will.
You’ve got the climate.
If you pick the right grape variety, in the right vineyard,
there’s no reason why New Zealand
can’t really challenge the world really,
in making top quality wines.
[liquid burbling]