In the course of tasting the samples for each month’s IWM, Jane and I have a number of side discussions, mostly relating to wine and the wine industry, but also covering husbands, children, dogs, shoes, food and any other snippets of particularly delicious gossip that may have come our way. Indeed on the drive home, I decided to forgo the usual pleasures of The Clash and instead, in the peace and quiet of a three hour journey, continued to ponder a number of the topics we had covered this time round.
First up was the curious aspect which we touched upon in the introduction to July’s IWM – the fact that there were a number of relatively highly scoring wines that neither of us was inclined to drink that evening with dinner. When one thinks about it, this is a very concerning and rather dismaying occurrence, given that wine is intended for exactly that – to drink, presumably with food. There have been many column inches already devoted to the ‘modern’ style of wines that have so much of everything – fruit, alcohol, oak, sugar etc. – that they are almost a meal in themselves. Not all of these wines fell into that category; many were just a little soulless, a little characterless and just didn’t really warrant enough interest to bother with for a glass with dinner.
One has to wonder if there are a couple of issues behind this.
With the uber-wines, if they are indeed victims of the Show mentality, are winemakers guilty of forgetting that the whole purpose of wine is to drink it, and generally people do this with food, and hopefully friends? New Zealand has a relatively new wine culture and wine industry, and there is no denying the help Show medals give to those trying to sell their wines in an increasingly crowded market. Surely though, making wines to merely so they stand out in a crowd is ultimately a dead end street for long-term success – at some point most consumers become more sophisticated and begin to look for more subtle and complex wines. It is telling that many of our best producers don’t enter in shows, not always as some (perhaps uncharitably) say because they can only lose, or don’t need to as they are already well-established, but because they more often than not make a style of wine that simply won’t stand out in a crowd of hundreds. Restrained, elegant, complex, these wines are made instead to be slowly savoured over an evening.
The second set of wines that were ignored due to being a little dull were also perhaps indicative of a worrying trend – these were technically ‘correct’ wines and certainly not faulty or unpleasant but there just had no character. Is our relatively newness, conservative history, and let’s face it, collective lack of flair (yes, yes, there are exceptions that prove the rule) showing in our wine style? Why are there so many wines out there that all taste the same? Ones that you wouldn’t bother with a second glass, much less wrestle the bottle off someone for the last drop. What’s wrong with a little funk, a little soul, and little character? Much more interesting to taste and to drink…
The next matter to ponder was whether New Zealand pinot noir can now be broadly categorized into three styles – Light and Cheerful (or the unfortunate flipside, thin and weedy); Pinot That Wants to be Syrah (mine’s bigger than yours); and Textural and Interesting (the sexy intellectual approach). I don’t think I would be drawing too long a bow to say that a roomful of people who regularly taste/drink the stuff could reach a pretty close consensus if asked to slot twenty NZ pinots into the three categories. Maybe this isn’t a bad thing, as instead of following a regional appellation system we could boldly institute a style-based one, and probably with much less bickering thatn that of the riesling residual sugar ruckus.
Finally, the Saint Clair range of wines provoked an interesting discussion on the concept of regionality and the direction the wine industry will take on this issue. Saint Clair has long been synonymous with Marlborough, not least through their emphatic success at Shows with their multitudinous and region-defining sauvignon blancs. So it was very interesting indeed to taste two of their (rather smart) reds from Hawke’s Bay (I won’t pretend I didn’t feel just a little relief when reading the labels to find they weren’t in fact Marlborough merlot and syrah…). This is hardly unusual, with a number of wineries drawing fruit from all around the country to best match variety with region, with varying degrees of success, but is begs the question of are we to be jacks of all trades but masters of none, or will we be able to pull off spreading ourselves around the place? Obviously, we don’t have the historical or legislative ties that make this regional promiscuity a rarity in France, indeed most of the Old World, but I do wonder if, given the future of New Zealand’s wine industry surely lies with making the very best wines possible, whether it might not be a slippery slope for all but the very best resourced and most quality-conscious producers. At what point will we stick to making the very best wines of one’s region, expressing one’s terroir to its fullest and finding out just what can be done with variety and soil in that spot. For all Marlborough producers, very few indeed seem to be interested in going beyond the highish-cropped, flick-in-and-of-a-tank style; Central Otago shows great promise at a micro-regional level with pinot noir; and there are some fascinating expressions of syrah in Hawke’s Bay. Reflecting on this potential for high quality wine throughout the country, it would be shame if more focus wasn’t on a narrower range in many cases. After all, surely that’s how Burgundy, Champagne, Mosel, Barolo et al became as exalted as they are?
(EJ)