New Zealand: Where Wine Blooms

New Zealand is one of the great success stories of modern wine. Barely a serious wine country before the 1970s, it created, almost from nothing, a style so distinctive that the world now recognises it in a single sniff: the electric, tropical Sauvignon Blanc of Marlborough. From a missionary’s hopeful first vines to a global phenomenon, its rise has been astonishingly fast¹.

A noble prospect

New Zealand wine has a precise birthday. On 25 September 1819 the missionary Samuel Marsden planted vines in the Bay of Islands, writing hopefully that the country might one day “produce as noble wines as any part of the globe.” A little later the Scot James Busby — who had studied winemaking in Bordeaux — made the first recorded New Zealand wine at Waitangi, laying the earliest foundations¹.

The long sleep

Then, for a century and a half, almost nothing happened. A cool, damp climate, a tiny population, temperance politics and restrictive licensing kept New Zealand wine marginal, and what was made was mostly sweet, fortified and forgettable. Not until the 1970s did growers begin, in earnest, to plant fine European grape varieties and chase quality rather than quantity².

Marlborough’s miracle

Everything changed in one place. In 1973 the large producer Montana planted Sauvignon Blanc in Marlborough, at the sunny north-eastern tip of the South Island, on the free-draining stony soils of the Wairau Valley. The grape ripened there like nowhere else on earth, and Marlborough proved so suited to it that the region now grows more grapes than all the rest of New Zealand combined³.

The smell that conquered the world

When Cloudy Bay released its Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc in the mid-1980s, drinkers in Britain and beyond were astonished: here was a white wine that leapt from the glass with gooseberry, passionfruit and fresh-cut grass, unlike anything from Europe. It became a sensation, and by 2002 Sauvignon Blanc had overtaken Chardonnay as New Zealand’s most planted grape — the engine of a huge export boom⁴.

A white wine you could recognise blindfolded — gooseberry, passionfruit and cut grass.— on Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc⁴

Pinot at the end of the earth

New Zealand is far more than Sauvignon Blanc. In Central Otago, deep in the mountainous south and the southernmost wine region on the planet, dry summers and cold nights ripen serious, perfumed Pinot Noir. Together with Chardonnay, aromatic whites and cool-climate sparkling wine, it has given the country a range that belies its size⁵.

Screwcaps and the clean-green brand

New Zealand has also led on how wine is made and sealed. Its growers championed the screwcap over cork in the early 2000s to protect their delicate, aromatic whites, and built a national reputation for sustainable, “clean and green” winemaking. For a country with only a couple of centuries of vines, it has become one of the most admired names in the wine world⁶.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• Tasmania, the cool-climate cousin
• Wine across the Tasman in Australia
• Sauvignon Blanc’s French homeland

References

1. BeverageDaily — New Zealand’s wine industry celebrates its 200th anniversary. www.beveragedaily.com ↩
2. Te Ara — The Encyclopedia of New Zealand: Wine. teara.govt.nz ↩
3. New Zealand Wine — The History of New Zealand Wine. www.nzwine.com ↩
4. Grape Collective — A History of Wine in New Zealand. grapecollective.com ↩
5. Wine-Searcher — Central Otago. www.wine-searcher.com ↩
6. Encyclopaedia Britannica — New Zealand. www.britannica.com ↩

Recommended reading

Vintage: The Story of Wine
Hugh Johnson
Sets New Zealand’s rapid rise within the long story of world wine.

A Short History of Wine
Rod Phillips
Good on the modern New World and the Sauvignon Blanc revolution.

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