CENTRAL'S FINEST
I’m only occasionally ashamed to admit I don’t know much about wine.
I mugged my way through a tour, in Spanish, of a winery in northern Argentina a few days before a predictably mad cycle tour of the vineyards around Mendoza, 1000km south.
Closer to home I visited a few places in Marlborough while backpacking almost two decades ago. It was not an experience replete with nuance.
Thanks, then, to the good people at Rippon and Mt Difficulty, who proved idiot-proof hosts.
Rippon has been in the Mills family since 1912, when it was part of the massive high country Wanaka Station.
Now it’s 15ha under vines and 20 more of family and farmland. Death and taxes.
Major planting started in 1982, early for Otago. From 30 grape varieties, it now focuses on six.
They don’t buy in fruit and the operation is biodynamic — a concept derived from Rudolf Steiner’s agricultural lectures. Essentially it advocates a farm being a self-sustaining whole.
“All we’re doing is to create something that speaks of where it’s from — it’s the French notion of terroir,” says Jo Mills, who married Nick Mills, from the fourth generation of the family.
Rippon is in the rain shadow of the Main Divide between Otago and the West Coast.
Inside the tasting hall, Jo gave us five wines — osteiner, sauvignon blanc, gamay, maturevine pinot noir and mature-vine riesling.
It was my first try of the former, “a bit of a curio” says Jo. She doesn’t like to talk flavours but says it’s “quaffable”. I got a grapefruit tang at the finish.
The sav was fuller than some New Zealand versions, the gamay from only 11 rows of grapes. Their mature pinot is their “most important wine — it seems to be distinctly of Rippon”. For an Englishman raised on the horrors of hock and Blue Nun, the mature riesling was another reminder that this is, in the right hands, a fine and flexible variety.
Over the Pisa Range into Bannockburn, and below the scarred, abandoned goldfields, Mt Difficulty is a bigger operation, with grapes at multiple owned and leased sites in the area. Like Rippon, it has a microclimate, several if you factor in the number of vineyards.
It is the warmest of the sub-regions in central Otago. Mt Difficulty has two major ranges — Roaring Meg and Bannockburn. The former is easy drinking, the latter more foodfriendly.
Over a platter on the restaurant terrace (“smoked Stewart Island mussel pate”, “Merguez sausage, piquillo pepper & baby rocket with a dill yogurt dressing”), the Cellar Door Manager, Jacqui RoseAnderson, poured four wines.
The Bannockburn Pinot Gris was a sunburst, the Bannockburn Pinot Noir lingering dark fruit. The Bendigo Ghost Town Syrah, from grapes grown at a single vineyard with a short but crucial period of extra afternoon sun, was a rich black sensation with a spice kick. To finish, the Bannockburn Manson Farm Late Harvest Pinot Gris, a dessert wine. Sweet but not cloying.
Mt Difficulty, the bluff that gives the winery its identity, got its name after an explorer and surveyor found it impassable while driving sheep from Oamaru to his station at Glenorchy. He had to go via Wanaka and the Crown Range, adding three weeks to the trip. He’s regarded as the founder of Queenstown. His name was William Rees.