Sun and stewardship produces excellence
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of helping judge the Colin Harrison Memorial Trophy for Nelson’s top chardonnay.
However, rather than selecting an outright winner as we have in previous years, we selected our top three wines and took those along to the recent Nelson Tasman Chamber of Commerce Aspire Conference and asked attendees to select the wine they liked the most.
Not every winery entered and the wines that did were from three different vintages (2014, 2015 and 2016). However, the three wines chosen by the judges were a great representation of the outstanding quality of chardonnay being produced in the Nelson region.
Attendees didn’t need to be wine experts, just wine consumers, we wanted to find out which wine they thought tasted best.
This was a bit of a risk for Wine Nelson. The danger was would consumers vote for a good quality wine with easy drinkability or would they go for a wine that was well made, beautifully balanced and showed the skill of the winemaker?
The results were reasonably even with a spread of votes across all three wines, however, there was a definite preference for one wine and last week the trophy was presented to Rimu Grove for their 2016 Nelson Chardonnay at the annual Wine Nelson winemaker’s dinner.
And this is the wine the judges picked as their top wine of the three finalists too so the risk paid off for Wine Nelson.
The awards dinner was held at Harbour Lights Bistro where chef Steve Coyne and his staff developed a special menu to celebrate the event, four courses of stunning food paired with seven wines.
The Rimu Grove 2016 chardonnay was paired with poached groper, smoked potato puree, a sous vide egg and wood sorrel. As each course was served with two wines the Rimu Grove chardonnay was served alongside a Chateaux de Puligny Montrachet Meurault 1er Cru Porusots 2012, a wine that retails for more than $100.
Everyone at our table preferred the Rimu Grove both as a wine and with the food, so it just goes to show Nelson wine producers make wine that can hold its head high with the rest of the world.
I asked Meg Matthews, the marketing manager for Wine Nelson why Nelson wine is so good. she told me there are many factors ‘‘but the true secret difference for this region is family.
‘‘All of the Nelson wineries are locally and family owned and some are multigenerational producers,’’ Matthews said.
‘‘With over 130 years of experience between them, they provide stewardship and collaborative leadership across the region.‘‘The size of our producers allows them to be nimble, to make gutsy calls when mother nature plays it tough. It’s not competitive; they share knowledge and encourage excellence. And that excellence gets bottled.’’
It goes without saying you need the right conditions to grow great grapes and the high sunshine hours in Nelson – especially in January, February and March when it is most needed to ripen wine grapes – but the soil conditions also play a huge part.
‘‘The gravel threaded clay soils of the Moutere Hills are renowned for producing wines of richness and texture,’’ says Matthews. ‘‘And the stony soils of the Waimea Plains provide a great terroir for aromatic whites."
Back to the Colin Harrison Trophy winning wine, I asked Patrick Stowe, owner and winemaker at Rimu Grove, what made this wine so special.
‘‘The vineyard manager, Luke Sivak, is outstanding and he works so hard all year to make sure we get great fruit to play with in the winery and then all I have to do is not stuff it up’’ he says with his trademark grin.
The vineyard location, on a northfacing aspect on an inlet near Mapua, and soil type helps a lot too.
Stowe says he is also certain vine age has a huge part to play. ‘‘The vines were planted in 1996 so we are working with 21 year old vines and I think that has a lot to do with the flavours and structural components we are seeing in our chardonnay, and other wines, now.’’
For me, it is all of these things added together that made the 2016 Rimu Grove Nelson Chardonnay award worthy. It is packed with delicious fruit flavours, is beautifully balanced and just a damn fine glass of wine to drink.