New Zealand, vol. 2

We pitched up in Wellington and were hosted by our friend Paul and Mary Terpstra who lived in a beautiful spot overlooking the harbor. In addition to being great hosts, Paul is a wealth of information on New Zealand winegrowing areas and their producers.

After a day of exploring Wellington, we decided to cook dinner for Paul and Mary and drink a wine I brought especially for Paul to taste, the 2006 Lenne Estate Karen's Pommard Pinot Noir. We only made two barrels of this wine and plan on releasing it sometime in May at the tasting room. The menu was a pork loin stuffed with a fig and olive tampenade and a farfalla pasta with lemon olive oil from Seresin Vineyards (a producer who we eventually visited that farms biodynamically on a large scale) with bacon, asparagus and pecorino cheese.

Paul brought out a 1999 Dry River Pinot Noir and treated us to our first taste of Pinot Noir from New Zealand. I knew Paul had set up an appointment at Dry River the following day, but really didn't know much about them. Well, the wine spoke volumes. The wine reminded me of a producers I have liked from the Central Coast of California, Chalone and Calera. It had generous black fruit and a beautiful aroma of a fine leather glove. The wine was no where near the end of its life, maybe not even to middle age and I was so grateful to be able to taste it as it was a wine that gave me an impression of New Zealand wine I am not likely to forget. Dry River was established in 1979 in Martinborough and now owned by El Molino, producers from Napa. Paul had set the bar very high with that wine and we had a wonderful meal that night with two great wines. The Lenne Pinot Noir is from the best part of the vineyard, the pommard block up top and has the best texture of any wine we have made to date. I think
Robert Parker would describe it as unctuous, a word that my wife contends is not proper use of English when describing something you like. Paul understood it, but he is a wine guy, just like me.

The next day Paul and Mary took us to Martinborough to visit Dry River and Ata Rangi. In between we stopped and had lunch at a gorgeous gravity fed winery called Alana Estate. It is typical for many producers to have restaurants at the cellar doors(New Zealand for tasting rooms) and many do it very well. I can't imagine trying to run a restaurant and make wine at the same time, but many seem to make it work quite well. The lunch at Alana Estate was delicious and the wines were all good, especially the Riesling. I started to realize that most producers make Riesling in this part of the world and do it beautifully. What a treat to sit with these fruit driven, floral wines, aromatic wines as they are listed on wine lists here.

After lunch it was time to visit Clive Paton at Ata Rangi, just down the road from Dry River. Ata Rangi is situated on the terraces, a gravelly patch of ground formed when earthquakes pushed an ancient stream bed to the surface. I love to find sites on stressed soil types and this was one of them. Clive was one of the originals in Martinborough, starting Ata Rangi in 1980 and I can only imagine the problems he must have endured in the early days. Like the other kiwi's we have met, Clive couldn't have been more gracious and toured the vineyard with us and tasted his wines, including a stunning late harvest Riesling called Kahu.

The next day we are off to Marlborough, New Zealand's largest winegrowing area. Stay tuned....