A TASTE OF CHURCH ROAD

Earlier this month, Gourmet Traveller hosted its first-ever virtual winetasting event alongside top chef Ben Shewry and winemaker Chris Scott.

More than 200 readers joined us for an evening of conversation and learning, as we sampled three of Church Road’s award-wining wines and went on a virtual journey through the Hawke’s Bay in New Zealand. Here are just a few of the fascinating things we learned.

BEN SHEWRY ON HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH WINE…

My history with wine is quite complicated if I’m being honest. As a young chef, you don’t earn a lot of money. Traditionally, we’ve always worked long hours for low pay. And so the irony of the restaurant industry is that I always worked in these amazing restaurants where wine was a special thing and it made a lot of people happy, but we could never afford to drink that wine or to partake in it. So for many years, I had this psychological impasse about it.

It was only fairly recently, about four years ago, my mind was changed by two women. My partner Kylie took me on a wine journey and we went to all these great vineyards, where I really fell in love with wine. And also our former head sommelier Jane, who was really amazing at demystifying wine. So I only really discovered wine in my late 30s but I fell in love with it and developed an almost rabid passion and started collecting it. I went from one end of the scale to the other.

CHRIS SCOTT ON WHAT MAKES THE HAWKE’S BAY SPECIAL…

We are New Zealand’s warmest wine region. Generally, we think of New Zealand as a cool climate country, but in terms of wine, we’re a moderate climate. So we tend to make some wine styles that are different to the rest of New Zealand. Rather than pinot noir and sauvignon blanc, our main wine styles are chardonnay, syrah and the Bordeaux reds. The chardonnay style that we make in the Hawke’s Bay tends to be quite full bodied, with beautiful fruit vibrancy and aromatics, but still retains a nice acidity and freshness. They never tend towards being big and overblown. That’s probably a common thing with good Hawke’s Bay wines across the board – there’s this lovely balance of weight and power, richness tempered with a little bit of elegance and cool climate freshness of fruit.

BEN SHEWRY ON REALISING WINEMAKING IS JUST FARMING…

What I realised when I started to go to vineyards and actually spent time on the land with winemakers and grape growers was that it is actually much closer to my agricultural upbringing. I grew up on a farm. I had never thought of winemaking and vineyards as a farming pursuit, which is strange because I’m a chef and think about ingredients all the time. But I hadn’t made that connection. It’s a very simple but quite powerful connection.

CHRIS SCOTT ON THE RISE OF SYRAH…

The New Zealand industry’s only been growing syrah

(also known as shiraz) for quite a short time. Commercially, we probably started back in the mid-80s. It was generally considered to be a warm climate grape variety. The general consensus, in the early days, was that syrah was an unsuitable variety for a cool climate. Until somebody bothered to have a look at France, where syrah is from originally and realised it would work here.

It’s still very small – only about two per cent of our grape plantings in the Hawke’s Bay. But it punches well above its weight in terms of international accolades and results. The thing that really makes them stand out is their fragrance – a beautiful floral and spiced fragrance. That’s the hallmark of good, cool climate syrah. church-road.com