Without going into technical details or gushing aroma and flavour descriptions it is fair to say that the traditional process produces a more distinctive, unique and enjoyable product and one with more winemaking integrity than simply blending white and red wine.
This uniqueness and distinctiveness has in recent years begun to be appreciated by a much wider wine drinking market. For example growth in rosé consumption in the UK has been astronomical recently. Apparently 10% of all wine consumed there is now rosé.
In New Zealand rosé consumption has also grown very rapidly in the last few years. We are not hampered by any particular regulations as to how we can make rosé wines, so there may be some examples made using the red-white blending procedure. In the Matakana region the number of rosé wines now produced has just about reached double figures, and to the best of my knowledge they are all made in the traditional manner.
True rosé is very different from the lolly-water formerly sold under the name of rosé, which gave it such a bad name for many. It is also very different from the red wines produced from the same grape varieties. Rosé can be delightful consumed chilled on a summer afternoon, or slightly warmer at this time of year and into winter – try it as an aperitif or with antipasti.
Call in to The Vintry next time you are in Matakana village and you will be able to taste the full array of local rosés. Approach them with an open mind and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed - you might even become a convert, as many others have in recent times.
Robin Ransom
President, Matakana Winegrowers Inc.
robin@ransomwines.co.nz.
(Originally published in Mahurangi Matters, April 2009
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( 2.9 / 547 )Given the recent Local Body Elections it seems timely to talk about the compliance requirements that are foisted by national, local and quasi-government organizations upon the citizens, especially those trying to make a living from their own enterprises. Businesses such as winegrowers, involved in producing and selling alcoholic beverages, cop it worse than most. Consider this burden:
Excise tax return & payment (Customs Dept., $1.75 per bottle); ALAC levy return & payment; GST return & payment (by definition paid on top of Excise and ALAC levy – a tax on a tax); PAYE return & payment; Property Rates (both RDC & ARC); Wastewater Discharge Record Keeping & Inspection (ARC); Sale of Liquor off licence (RDC); Sale of Liquor on licence (RDC); Certificate of Registration for food premises (RDC); Bar/Restaurant Manager Licensing (RDC); Licence Controller Qual., (Hospitality Standards Inst., NZ); ACC return & payment; APRA Levy - so we can play recorded music in a public place; NZ Wine Institute (a statutory body), annual levy; NZ Wine Institute - harvest statistics; NZ Wine Institute - acreage and varieties planted statistics; NZ Wine Institute - volume of wine sold statistics; NZ Food Safety Authority - annual audit of record keeping for exporting wine; NZ Food Safety Authority – separate audit and certificate of compliance for every wine exported; Sustainable Winegrowing (part of NZ Wine Institute), provision of comprehensive vineyard & winery operational data plus audit and levy payment; Growsafe agrichemical licensing (NZAET); Firearms licensing (NZ Police).
I am bound to have omitted something here, but this list involves time and effort in data collation and calculations, and in some cases having to undertake training courses or being audited, on something like 80 different occasions over the course of a year – an average of one and a half times per week, and payment of almost 60 cheques. There are of course a completely different set of bureaucratic requirements if you want to build, or change buildings or wastewater provisions, which in Rodney District has in my experience always involved nightmarish processes ad infinitum, until you are ready to tear your hair out.
I can report however, a recent instance of the small guys winning. During the course of preparing for the wine and food event at the recent Kowhai Festival we were required by RDC to get both a resource consent and a building permit, at a cost of $270, so we could erect a marquee for a few hours. I happened to mention this to Penny Webster in her capacity as a Northern Councillor. She responded as any normal person would, with a mixture of astonishment and exasperation, and vowed that the money would be refunded. She was as good as her word, and had sorted the matter out to our satisfaction the very next day.
Let’s hope this bodes well for the new Council’s attitude to the very vexed issue of the huge time and costs we are faced with in coping with local authority bureaucracy.
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( 3 / 539 )The Kowhai Festival has been going for many years, and in more recent times there has been a wine and food component with the activities on the main day of the Festival. The first year we had a number of local winery participants was 1998. The wine and food event was held in the Warkworth wharf carpark area that year, and a range of non-local wines were represented as well as three or four local wineries.
Ten years on we are pleased to say the tradition is continuing, and the wine and food section will be back in its original location by the wharf. This time there are a number of improvements which we hope all will approve of. We have eight participants – all local wineries. As the Kowhai Festival is a traditional celebration of life in the Mahurangi and Matakana area, we decided that the wines represented should all be grown in this region.
We will have a good selection of local food producers in amongst the winery stalls and there will be no bottle sales this year. In previous years the liquor licence for the day has allowed sales of full bottles of wine, but we feel this has the potential to spoil the atmosphere. You can sample the wines on show by buying a Festival winetaster glass, which is yours to keep and also gives you one free taste of your choice. Subsequent tastes must be paid for.
This year Matakana Winegrowers will be donating any surplus from sales of Festival winetaster glasses, after costs have been covered, to the Centre at Warkworth Project. The size of the donation will depend on the number of glasses we sell, so do come along, buy a glass, sample some wines and join in the Festival fun.
All we need to make the day a real cracker is to have nice weather, although fortunately wine tasting is an all-weather activity!
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( 2.9 / 534 )There are hundreds of grape varieties which belong to the world’s only true winegrape species vitis vinifera. It is thought to have originated south of the Black Sea, in the region now known as Georgia and Armenia. This area is very close to Mount Ararat, where, according to the Bible, Noah’s Ark came to rest, and where Noah apparently settled, planted the first vineyard, and became the first winemaker. The earliest scientific evidence for cultivation of vinifera dates back at least 6000 years, and the earliest evidence of deliberate winemaking dates to about 5500 years ago.
In the following few thousand years vitis vinifera spread all over the Middle East, the Mediterranean and Europe. In the course of this vast dispersal in space and time, genetic variation would inevitably occur through natural selection. Human intervention in this process would have accelerated it, so that in local areas certain variants came to be valued more than others, and hence the eventual development of the hundreds, maybe thousands of region-specific varieties of vitis vinifera we are now blessed with.
Most of the varieties grown in New Zealand today originated in France. Sauvignon Blanc from the Loire Valley and Bordeaux; Pinot Noir and Chardonnay from Burgundy and Champagne; Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc from Bordeaux; Pinot Gris, Riesling and Gewurztraminer from Alsace and Germany; Syrah (Shiraz) from the Rhone Valley. As time goes on the range of varieties and countries of origin is extending – Sangiovese and Montepulciano from Italy for example.
Being freed from many of Europe’s restrictive rules and regulations about what can be grown where has ensured a pioneering experimentation in New Zealand, which has demonstrated the great versatility of vitis vinifera varieties and undone many myths in the process. For example the most widely planted variety in the warm, moist, windy, maritime-influenced climate of Matakana is pinot gris, and general opinion is that it does rather well here. Yet this variety originated in the cool, dry, continental climate of Eastern France.
Despite the fact that the varieties we work with have been transplanted into thoroughly foreign soils and climates, the consensus seems to be that New Zealand wines have a uniqueness in their fresh, clean fruitiness which gives them a universal appeal, recognisable but also quite different from their illustrious European ancestors.
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( 3 / 520 )These days there is considerable public concern about environmental damage from careless farming practices, and awareness of the need to farm more sustainably. So it is understandable that people feel concerned when they see sprays being used in vineyards.
Most vineyard spraying involves use of products which are relatively benign in the environment, indeed many are acceptable for organic farming regimes. Most protect vines against fungal diseases – black spot, downy mildew, powdery mildew, and various forms of bunch rot. A whole new range of horticultural sprays has been developed in recent years involving use of natural control agents, generally bacteria or other fungi, which either attack the harmful fungi or move into their ecological niche and prevent them from developing.
All chemical sprays are subject to MRLs – Maximum Residue Limits, which are readily measurable in wine and legally enforceable. MRLs restrict the amount of such sprays winegrowers can use, and the times they can use them. For instance, they can not be used within a certain number of days before harvest.
In addition, New Zealand Winegrowers, the statutory industry body which all winegrowers must belong to, has in recent years established an organisation called Sustainable Winegrowing New Zealand. Winegrowers are not obliged to belong to this body but currently 60 per cent of New Zealand’s vineyard area belongs and is accredited to SWNZ.
SWNZ was developed to provide a “best practise” model of environmental care in the vineyard, to promote responsible behaviour in terms of the well-being of staff, neighbours and the community, and to guarantee better quality assurance from vineyard to bottle. SWNZ places stringent restrictions on the use of agrichemicals and addresses issues such as soil health and water quality. Members are audited on their compliance, and failure to comply results in loss of accreditation.
Even without restrictions and regulations winegrowers know that in order to compete in a crowded world wine market we all need to manage our vineyards as closely as we can to New Zealand Winegrowers’ motto “the riches of a clean green land”.
Wine and the economy
The nationwide grape harvest this year was an all time record. At 205,000 tonnes, it was 11 percent higher than the previous biggest vintage in 2006 and almost four times the size of 10 years earlier. This indicates both that the New Zealand industry is very young and that it has been very successful in its short life. It is difficult to think of another industry in recent times which has gone from very modest beginnings to such burgeoning success so quickly.
The phenomenal growth has, however, had its problems and anxieties. At the millennium, the Wine Institute of NZ was concerned about how all of this wine was going to be sold. They were anxious to convey the message that new vineyard plantings should slow down. There was no way New Zealanders could drink it all and they could see no possibility of an export industry developing in such a short time to soak up the ever-increasing surplus.
How wrong they were! In 2000, NZ exported around 19 million litres of wine, for $169m, but by 2006 this had grown to 58 million litres and $512m. A more than three-fold increase in just six years and we have been able to maintain premium prices with it. Back in 2000, NZ wine fetched a higher average price per bottle in the UK than wine from any other country and that remains the case today. The demand for our wine is such that even with the record 2007 harvest, there are likely to be some supply difficulties in the short term.
To put the importance of wine to the NZ economy into context, wine sales are now second only in value to sheepmeats among NZ’s primary product exports to the UK, and that country takes less than one third of all our wine exports.
Fundraising quiz
On another subject altogether, I would like to put in a plug for a charity event to be held at Ascension Vineyard on Saturday, August 11. This is a “Wine Options” quiz where you get to taste a range of wines and are then given a series of options to help you identify them. There is a great prize for the winning team of four and proceeds will go to Warkworth Primary School. To find out more about this fun event and to enter your team, contact Tracey at 422 2488 or email mardale@xtra.co.nz.
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