The New Zealand Wine fair blew into town yesterday with a stellar gathering of wine producers showing off their work for trade and media. It was a splendid opportunity to taste beyond the normal availabilities of Vintages and the LCBO, and there were treats galore. Robert Ketchin organizes the event and he started with a walk-about pour-your-own tasting of 16 Pinot Noirs from various parts of the country, designed to showcase regional differences. For me, one wine stood out dramatically from the pack – Ostler Vineyards Caroline’s Pinot Noir 2011. Grown in the Waitaki Valley on the south island, the vineyards sit on limestone – rare in NZ – and the Pinot has an underlying minerality that sits firm beneath the sliding, prismatic illusions of cherries and damsons, liquorice, dark chocolate and smoke. If you want some you’ll have to contact the agent, Mark Cuff at The Living Vine Inc. It costs around $55 a bottle.
Other wines that made a big impression on me? Loveblock Sauvignon Blanc 2013 is going to be in the Vintages July 7th release ($25.95). It’s made by Erica and Kim Crawford (yes, that Kim Crawford) from grapes grown high in the hills above Marlborough’s Awatere Valley. It’s fragrant, delicate, luminous – not one of those big, pungent New Zealand Sauvignons that jump out of the glass at you.
Then there was the Kings Series from Marisco Vineyards in Marlborough’s Waihopai valley. Owner and winemaker Brent Marris traces his family all the way back to one of the 35 illegitimate children of King Henry I and he calls his Chardonnay The King’s Bastard. His peachy, oak-touched, hint-of-nutmeg Pinot Gris is named The King’s Thorn, for a subsequent member of the family who refused to give up the Isle of Lundy to Henry II. Then there’s A Sticky End, a delectably sweet Sauvignon Blanc made from grapes that grow in a shadowy part of the estate and where botrytis develops every autumn. Named for another ancestor who was hanged, drawn and quartered by Henry III for piracy, it has an amazing aroma of toast and marmalade, tastes of honey and peaches and apricots and has a delicate acidity that keeps the sticky weight and sweetness from feeling too overwhelming. Not sure if we’ll be seeing any of these wines in our liquor store but a quick call to the agent, Peter Sainsbury of Glencairn Wine Merchants, might secure you a case on private order.