Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Busman's Holiday


Some New Zealand Hotties

Before it is all gone from my ever-diminishing capacity, I would like to jot down some notes on Margo and my trip through the South Island wine regions.

We set off later than planned, after consuming Crom-Vegas' finest breakfast with Sonja at Fusee Rouge. Our first day's travel took us across the lower passes of the Southern Alps and on into Christchurch - an artsy town filled with cruising boy racers and an Anglican cathedral. From CHCH we headed up the coast highway 1, through Canterbury and on into The Waipara - NZ's most developing wine district. After visiting the beautiful premises of Pegasus Bay and its estate vineyards, we hied forward to the Waipara Food & Wine Celebration - a lucky unplanned happenstance. Here, amid whitebait patties, saxaphone quartets and picnicking Kiwis, were able to taste all the Waipara had to offer, including those of Danny Schuster and Alan McCorkindale. Our favorite by far was Mountford, who offered not only a dense and aromatic Pinot, but also a sparkly rose under screwcap. As a side note, the Mountford wines are made by a blind man, who obviously rises to his particular challenges.

Tempting as they were, we left the accordians and hay bales behind us, and forged forward up the East Coast. Passing through santa cruzy Kaikoura and flanked by the railroad tracks on one side and the Pacific on the other, we found our way to Blenheim, epicenter of the Marlborough wine region. Everywhere you look in Marlborough there are grapevines, seas of them stretching flat from the ocean up to the foothills, broken only by the occasional array of shiny stainless steel tanks pushing up through the green canopy.

We would have been lost in this flood of Sauvignon blanc, were it not for the expert navigation of our friend Jonas VanDerPol. Jonas has moved back to the region after a number of foreign vintages, including two in the Willamette Valley. Prior to that, he worked for Cloudy Bay and a few other Marlborough producers of note. With Mr. J at the helm, we ploughed our way through nine wineries in the course of one day! We visited Mt Riley, Villa Maria, Allan Scott, Isabel, Fromm, St. Clair, Cloudy Bay, Seresin and Lawson's, and attempted but were unable to visit Montana, Wither Hills and Spy Valley.


Marlborough is the home of New Zealand Sauvignon blanc - the engine that drives the country's entire wine industry. An engine fueled by gooseberries, greased with capsicum (green pepper) and sparked with aromas of cat pee. We tasted plenty of bad examples, and a few good ones, including of course Cloudy Bay's, but it was pinot we were really after. The best reds we tasted were at Isabel - a very Oregon style pinot - and at Fromm, where the Syrah was also a standout and the riesling was good. Both wineries have old, densely planted, and meticulously tended vineyards.

We had a fantastic time staying in Blenheim with Jonas' wife Sue at her parents Barrie and Raewyn Parker's tidy home. I'm no southern belle, but the 'kindness of strangers' indeed.

The following day we convoyed around the Marlborough Sounds, the long way to Nelson and Jonas' home. We stopped in Hamilton for the requisite green lips - they are grown in The Sounds along seeded lengths of chain - and continued over the banged-up Pelorus River Bridge and onto Tasman Bay. Once out of The Sounds, as in Blenheim, any land too steep for vines or sheep is planted with pine trees. New Zealand climate is a such that these trees mature fully in 29 years, creating soft wood unfit for building timber, but ideal for the pulp mills in Japan and through Asia. The Nelson area in the north of the island used to be planted to tabacco, but is now cultivating grapes, hops, orchard fruits, and a bit of green tea. The VanDerPols have a pear orchard in Motueka beyond Nelson and a nursery and vineyard at their home a bit outside of the town. We were welcomed by two dachshunds and a tray of gin and tonics.
Job (Jan Joseph) and Jos VanDerPol live perched atop a tractor shed overlooking their spread in a cozy home filled with books, boomerang children and the smell of homecooked meals. Margo and I did manage to visit a few more wineries, including Waimea Estate - where sister Wietske VanDerPol is a winemaker - Seifried, and Neudorf - the latter being our favorite. Mostly we explored bohemian Nelson, walked on the beach, made stovetop espressos and sampled Jos' homemade fruit eau du vie.

It wasn't all wine mind you. I spent a good week exploring the (Wet) West Coast.
Watch out Sir Edmund

There were glacier hikes (Fox Glacier) and lakeside bikes (Lake Kaniere), as well as quiet days on driftwood beaches and drizzly nights spent sharing dirty jokes (Hokitika). It seems like months - it has been - since I wandered back through the VanDerPol and Parker households - my ankles covered in sandfly bites and my eyes filled with visions of snow covered peaks seen from wave swept beaches - on my way across to the North Island.

Marge went native in a big way. Just don't make her mad and you'll be right

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Venturing to the Edge

Martinborough is a town of around 700 permanent residents, many of whom are cockies living out in the wop wops on some sort of farm. Town itself is centered around a grassy square which is circled by a few cafes and shops. Legend has it that Mr. Martin had many daughters and travelled the world looking for suitable sons in-law to marry them off to. The Martinborough streets, a tribute to his fatherly dedication, are named for the places he visited. I live on Dublin Street, The brewery is on New York and the hostel is on Cologne (one up from Strasbourge). I've never been to Sackville, but there is a street duly named. Always a patriot, Martin aligned these avanues like a Union Jack. Nowadays, Martinborough is a weekend destination for Wellingtonians, many of whom own a second home here. The town swells with swells on Friday evening and deflates again sometime Sunday afternoon. Other than that, there are about thirty-odd wineries and lots of grapes.

I alit from the train at 9:30 in the morning. By 11'o'clock I was working at my new job. That's what Larry McKenna, winemaker and owner of Escarpment Vineyard would call "getting right into it." Getting into it on my first day meant picking Pinot noir at a vineyard we manage a few blocks off of the square. I met 'the girls' - Escarpment's fulltime vineyard crew, 'the boys' - Noel the tractor driver and Chris the everything else driver (a couple of hard and capable blokes) and Guy McMaster, Escarpment's production manager and Larry's right hand. By the end of the week I felt I'd known them for months, and by now they feel like I've been here forever (and are ready for me to be gone).

Larry McKenna is a highly respected leader of the NZ winemaking community. He shows up on numerous tasting panels, consults for wineries and vineyards throughout this country and Australia and has been making his own damn fine wine here in M'boro for over twenty years. They call him 'The Prince of Pinot'. He's a crew-cut Teva-and-shorts wall of a man with a great sense of humor, youthful enthusiasm, aged wisdom and heaps of humility. I enjoy working for him. Escarpment is his new project. The vineyards were planted starting in 1999 and the first vintage was 2003. It's sited out Te Muna Road about 5k from town, 50 acres planted on gravely river terrace overlooking the Huramunga River bed. The vineyard is planted with a variety of Pinot noir clones - including a close-planted block of self-rooted Abel (a DRC 'gumboot' clone named after the customs agent that confiscated it) - Chardonnay, Pinot gris, Pinot Blanc and Riesling. This young vineyard has already produced a single vineyard wine named Kupe (the pre-Maori navigator) which has just been released to great acclaim.

The winemaking process is simple. We pick the fruit - can't make wine without grapes - and tip it onto a shaker table for sorting. After picking out any green or moldy fruit, the grapes are lifted up with a conveyor and dumped into a destemmer. The berries are then dumped into a open-top fermenter where they will live for the next couple of weeks. Escarpment has a number of different tanks and fermenters, foremost among them two french oak cuves (like huge barrels open on one end) that allow up to 8 tonne of fruit to ferment in the Burgundian style. After five to seven days,the must begins to ferment naturally or is innoculated with special yeasts. We take their vitals - sugar and temp - in the mornings, and plunge thrice daily to keep the cap wet and the yeasties happy. Once the juice is wine and the cap has sunk, we pump off what we can into a tank and dig out the rest (just like it sounds).

This is pressed gently for 2.5 hours with a few basic enzymes added to help the solids settle out. The next day we fill up the barrels with the young wine. It will go through a second malolactic ferment in the Spring and will be ready to bottle before the next harvest. Voila!

Except, it's never that bloody easy, is it? First off, there was a lot of rain when the vines were flowering which led to a severe loss of fruit potential. Then, in late March, just a few weeks off from picking, there were massive rains in the Wairapara (M'boro). Over 200 mm's in two days. Rivers rose, roads were washed out, and ripening berries burst from over-saturation, sugars were diluted, and molds set in. We picked some fruit that was coated in river mud from the floods. No one in Martinborough escaped this event, and every winery was down around 50% from last year's yields. Escarpment is a young and developing winery, designed to top out at 100 tonnes of fruit and expecting just 70 tonnes this year. We did just under 40. The berries were small and the flavors developed and we expect great things from the fruit we brought in. 2005 will be a vintage in great demand from Martinborough, both because the wines will be rare and of the highest quality.