If you aspire to make sparkling wine, Champagne is the benchmark, for chardonnay and pinot noir Burgundy is your reference point and Bordeaux blends – well, I’ll let you close the loop on that one.
While filming the documentary A Seat at the Table – a film in which I search for the answer as to whether New Zealand has a seat at the table of the finest wine producers in the world – the story naturally led me to France, the spiritual home not only of the grapes that perform so very well in New Zealand such as sauvignon, chardonnay, pinot noir and syrah, but also our wine culture that embodies the fine wine we produce.
You can understand why the French, the world’s best marketers, shy away from competitive-comparative discussions. There have been legendary events in wine history such as The Judgement of Paris, where wine merchant and writer Steven Spurrier pitted the best of Napa against Burgundy and Bordeaux and won. More recently was the Kumeu River v White Burgundy tasting, where British wine figurehead Stephen Browett organised a tasting at which the best palates in the world blind tasted all of Kumeu River’s chardonnays against the equivalent Burgundian counterparts – again, the new-world producer won. As I found out on my journey, the French are justified in frowning upon such tastings.
In French, there is no word for winemaker. It doesn’t make sense that a single person could trump all the other environmental factors that create the concept of terroir – site, soil, climate and tradition. Embodying differences in regions, vineyards, and even blocks within single vineyards is the next chapter in the evolution of New Zealand’s adaptation of France’s wine culture.
Grant Taylor, as well as being a great French cheese enthusiast, loves Burgundy wines and has applied some old-world thinking to his Central Otago label Valli. Valli produces pinot noir from Bendigo, Gibbston, Bannockburn and, more recently in their 25-year history, the Waitaki sub-region. The French have a saying along the lines of ‘C’est pinot’, meaning ‘that glass smells and tastes like pinot’. It’s not a compliment. A glass of pinot noir (or chardonnay, for that matter) is all about opening a window to that place, that site, that row of grapes and that vintage. Tasting the Valli wines side by side is a great and delightfully fun way to appreciate and embrace this French idea of individual expressions of vineyards and regional differences rather than simply looking for ‘Central Otago’ pinot, perhaps over another region.
Vive la difference! That’s one of the many French ideals we celebrate at The College Hill Wine Room, our new home of wine culture in Auckland. Our philosophy is to showcase ‘the very best from here and very best from there’. Any day of the week, you can book or drop in to compare and contrast Kumeu River Crémant next to a fine grower Champagne or Neudorf Home Block Chardonnay next to a bottle of great white burgundy as a hosted tasting experience or simply a self-guided tour through the 40 wines by the glass and over 400 by the bottle.
New Zealand, alongside France, has the opportunity to be the world’s leading boutique fine-wine producer, making some of the very best, small-volume, possibly highest–priced, by-demand wines in the world. This is another powerful concept we can adapt from the French and their 900-year head start.
