Because this featured in the national news for days on end last month most readers will know what it is about. Briefly, the Wither Hills wine company produced two quite different sauvignon blanc wines but labeled them identically. One of them, of which there was a very small amount available, secured a top ranking in a Cuisine magazine wine tasting. The other, which comprised the vast bulk of all the wine with this label, was not entered in the Cuisine competition.
It is important to point out that there was no quality issue in either case. By all accounts, both wines were of good quality. However, this is not the point, and whether or not Wither Hills did this deliberately is also not the point. The issue is that wine consumers have a right to expect that every bottle they buy of a wine with an identical label will be identical wine – especially when claims of superiority are made by way of medals or trophies or whatever.
Some Matakana winemakers choose to enter wine shows and others do not, and our reasons for deciding one way or the other are many and varied. However, wine buyers who purchase a Matakana-grown wine which has a medal sticker attached can be more confident that every bottle they buy will be identical, because none of us make large enough batches of wine to cause the problem Wither Hills faced. They produce such a large volume of sauvignon blanc that it is difficult for them to blend the various components into a single batch before bottling.
What this event has highlighted is the fallibility of the wine show system, and the potential for corrupt practise which it allows. It is now up to the organisers of wine shows to take steps to ensure this sort of duplicity cannot happen again.
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( 3 / 461 )With the recent formation of Matakana Winegrowers Incorporated, we have finally been able to get some idea of the size and shape of the local winegrowing industry.
Here are some results from a recent survey of members which may interest readers.
• The group was incorporated earlier this year and has 29 members. A measure of how new the local winegrowing industry is can be seen in the fact that our longest established member had their first vintage in 1991 and only six had harvested grapes before 2000. Four had their first vintage this year and another four will have their first in 2007.
• The 2006 vintage was produced from 78 hectares (about 193 acres) and by 2008, there will be 98 hectares (242 acres) in production. While this makes us a rather small region compared with say Marlborough or Hawkes Bay, we would argue that size doesn’t matter. We are all small family-run businesses focused firmly on quality – there are no wine factories in Matakana. We tend our vineyards by hand to maximize fruit quality, and as the motto adopted some years ago by the original group of Matakana winegrowers says “it’s where we are that makes the difference”. We all believe passionately in the Matakana region as a place where great wines can be grown.
• The earliest growers saw the region as a place for red grapes. While more white acreage has been planted recently, there will still be a slight predominance of red grapes in 2008 – 54% of the total. By that time, the largest single grape variety will be the white grape pinot gris, which will account for almost one third of the total regional acreage. Syrah (17%) and merlot (12%) will be the two main red varieties. These three plus chardonnay, cabernet franc, cabernet sauvignon and sangiovese will comprise just on 85% of the total Matakana vineyard, and the remainder will comprise a further seven red varieties and six whites.
The survey paints a confident picture of the Matakana wine industry which will only strengthen in the years ahead.
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( 3 / 461 )When pastoral farmers are hanging out for lots of rain after the generally dry northern summers, grape growers want the opposite – if there is to be rain at all we want it to be brief and moderate.
However this does not mean that moisture will cause problems. Consider humidity. Many people believe humidity is bad for grape vines. Wrong. On the contrary, moderately high humidity is essential for grape vines to function properly. Not only that, moderate humidity is associated with high wine quality, while its absence in hot and dry climates has negative consequences for the composition of grapes and ultimately for wine quality.
The Oxford Companion to Wine, in its entry on humidity, classifies the world’s wine growing regions into high, intermediate and low afternoon humidity areas, and notes that almost all of the world’s wine regions with high wine quality reputations are also high humidity regions.
Humidity can still cause problems – a few days of close to 100% relative humidity, combined with warm temperatures and absence of either sun or wind can cause serious fungal infection. Fortunately this combination of conditions is rare. The sunny and windy nature of our climate almost always ensures that we escape the worst effects of persistent excessive humidity.
Likewise with rain. All plants, grapes included, need moderate rain throughout their seasonal cycle. Only in the critical few weeks before harvest will heavy, sustained rain cause problems. In the north we have plenty of rain, but most of it falls at times of year that will not cause concern.
So when people assert that our climate is too wet or too humid to grow wine grapes, that is a myth. The real issue grape growers face throughout the country is weather, not climate. Inclement weather can occur in all winegrowing regions, whether Marlborough, Martinborough or Matakana. We are all playing a percentages game, and in the Matakana region the numbers are on our side much more often than not, which is about as good as it gets anywhere in New Zealand.
Robin Ransom
Matakana Winegrowers Inc.
robin@ransomwines.co.nz
Originally published in Mahurangi Matters, November 2006
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( 3 / 417 )For those whose living comes from the land, Spring marks the beginning of a new year in a very real way. This is the case for winegrowers as much as anyone.
The winter vineyard maintenance jobs have been done and pruning should be finished by mid-September. Pruning is a critical operation because it determines how the vines will fruit in the coming season. It is undertaken in the winter when the vines are bare and dormant. Because grape vines produce their fruit on the current season’s growth, the idea with pruning is to remove most of last season’s growth but leave enough buds to produce the coming year’s shoots, leaves, flowers and fruit.
If the vines are not pruned they become an unruly entanglement of canes and shoots. This creates dense growth in the next season, which means ineffective vines and ultimately, unripe and possibly diseased fruit.
This winter has been particularly good for the region’s winegrowers, having been relatively dry and abnormally cold. Winter frosts are good for vineyards because they ensure complete dormancy and help to lower spore counts of the fungal conditions which can, under certain circumstances, cause havoc during the growing season.
From late August, the early varieties such as chardonnay and pinot gris are showing “movement”. The new buds start as furry protuberances and gradually swell to the point where suddenly they burst into little shoots and leaves, and then growth takes off. At this time of year a series of still photographs of a single shoot taken every few hours makes a very obvious “movie” when the shots are put together.
By the end of September, most grape varieties will have experienced budburst. If you look at the region’s vineyards from a distance right now you will see thin parallel lines of green rolling up and down the slopes, the new shoots and leaves emerging from last year’s canes which are clipped to the horizontal “fruiting wires”. The next critical event in the vineyard is flowering – more about that later.
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( 3 / 450 )In Melbourne recently I read an article in The Age which reported the AGM of the Victoria Winegrowers Association. The meeting noted that the Australian wine industry as a whole markets itself “from the bottom up”. The big Australian winemaking conglomerates focus on mass production of cheap “commodity” wine, and are flooding the world’s wine markets with this sort of product. Because these big companies account for the great majority of Australian wine production (just like a few big companies do in New Zealand) the discerning wine drinkers of the world are developing a picture of Australian wine as being cheap and second-rate.
The flip-side of this is that the small, quality-focused producers are being tarred with the brush which the big producers are wielding, which compromises their ability to sell their wine profitably. The Victorian solution is that the Australian wine industry should develop a two-tiered marketing strategy, which clearly distinguishes high quality from commodity wine.
What does this have to do with the winegrowers of Matakana? The New Zealand market has been flooded with commodity wine in recent years, most of which comes from Australia, but some also from Europe and some from New Zealand. As a group, Matakana Winegrowers operate at the top end of the quality continuum, so we are in a similar position to the quality-focused Victorian winegrowers.
We acknowledge the place and role of the mass-produced product. But the fact that most wine sold and consumed in New Zealand is in this category presents us with a challenge. That is, to educate consumers to understand the distinction between wine which is mass-produced to a taste formula, and wine which is unique, hand-made, and bears the stamp of its region of origin, then to seek out the latter for preference.
Given this challenge it is great to be able to report that the support we are getting from the local population and restaurants is strong and continues to grow. The local winegrowers with cellar doors talk about the enthusiastic response they get from tourists to the region, particularly from offshore. Having such a good home base helps us tackle a crowded global market when it comes to selling our wines outside the region.
Robin Ransom
President, Matakana Winegrowers Inc.
robin@ransomwines.co.nz
Originally published in Mahurangi Matters, September 2006
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