Iconic wines, local legend
Church Road Winery celebrates 120 years of exceptional winemaking with the release of its new 2014 TOM vintage range.
I magine going out for dinner and not being able to order a glass of wine. Back in prohibition New Zealand that was a reality.
We can thank wine pioneer Tom McDonald, founder of Church Road Winery, for his part in helping lobby the government to make it legal to serve wine in restaurants in New Zealand.
When McDonald began making wine in the 1920s it was considered one step higher than a drug dealer in terms of social status. Such was the reputation of the New Zealand wine industry. It’s a stark contrast to today where winemakers are celebrated, and like Church Road’s current chief winemaker Chris Scott, win prestigious awards. McDonald was pivotal to helping make that shift.
“The industry was largely based on producing cheap fortified wines from very inferior grape varieties and Tom did that because that was how they made money back in those days,” Scott explains. “But as he learned more about winemaking he started tasting some of the great wines of France and got pretty excited about trying to produce something like that in New Zealand.”
McDonald pioneered the first cabernet sauvignon in Hawke’s Bay in 1949, and chardonnay production in the region in the 1960s. “Tom’s early 1960s cabernets were pretty much New Zealand’s first collectable wine,” says Scott. “You had to be on a mailing list and there was a waiting list to be on the mailing list and it really took off in 1965 when a visiting English wine writer of the day described it as a baby Chateau Margaux. It opened the eyes of the Australian wine industry to the quality potential of New Zealand as a viticultural area.”
This year Church Road Winery celebrates its 120th birthday and its wines are still collectable, especially the TOM range. Each bottle of TOM wine is individually numbered and hand-finished with a red wax seal (which helps eliminate random oxidation during the ageing process) and comes in a presentation box.
When the inaugural TOM 1995 vintage was released in 1999 it coincided with the opening of the Tom McDonald Cellar at Church Road Winery in Taradale, and its world-class underground wine museum (old wine tanks that were once filled with sherry). A must-see, the museum is tribute to McDonald as well as home to priceless wine artefacts dating back to the Iron Age 1000BC.
The latest collectables are the just released Church Road TOM Chardonnay 2014, Merlot Cabernet Sauvignon 2014 and Syrah 2014, unveiled at a special tasting hosted by Scott at luxury lodge The Farm at Cape Kidnappers. If you are impatient in nature, invest in the Chardonnay which is recommended to drink from 2018 to 2026. Red lovers will have to wait a bit longer to try the Merlot Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah at its best – 2020 to 2034.
“It’s fitting the wines that epitomise our winemaking skill are being released at the same time as we celebrate our history as one of the oldest wineries in New Zealand,” says Scott. We’ll raise a glass to that!