Marlborough Country
Newcastle Herald
Wednesday March 19, 2003
NEW Zealanders are still smarting over the loss of yachting's America's Cup, but they can take comfort from their world reign in another endeavour.
That is as the source of magical sauvignon blanc wines.
It's a supremacy that would have seemed impossible 25 years ago when the undistinguished German muller-thurgau variety provided the bulk of New Zealand dry white whites.
Most of the acclaim has come for sauvignon blancs grown in the Marlborough Region on the South Island, which The World Atlas of Wine declares ``opened a Pandora's box of flavour that no-one could ignore and, more importantly, no other part of the world seems able to replicate".
The crisp, intense, pungent, aromatic, gooseberry, capsicum, kiwifruit, green pea and herbs and spices characters of Marlborough sauvignon blancs have won a host of Australian and international devotees.
As I saw recently during a two-week stay in New Zealand, this has spread a wide carpet of green vines over the Marlborough landscape.
What a contrast to my first foray to New Zealand 28 years ago when there were no vineyards visible at Marlborough and Kiwi wines were poured with an air of apology!
European settlement of the Marlborough Region dates back to 1848 and the land was devoted to sheep grazing, cropping and fruit orchards before the first wine grape vines were planted in the 1870s.
A few small family winemaking enterprises struggled on into the 1900s.
However all but one had gone by the early 1970s when New Zealand's North Island-based Montana wine company began looking for a suitable new area in which to expand.
Montana, the giant among NZ wine companies was founded by Ivan Yukich, who arrived in New Zealand from Croatia in 1934 at the age of 15 and produced his first wine in 1944 near Auckland.
With one of New Zealand's sunniest and driest climates and with lower land acquisition costs than the contending Poverty Bay and Hawke's Bay areas on the North Island, Marlborough was chosen by Montana.
Montana planted the first of a new generation of Marlborough vineyards on the outskirts of Blenheim in 1973.
The bulk of these first vines were muller-thurgau and the failure to provide them with irrigation meant that most died.
Montana, however, persisted at Blenheim, adding successful plantings of sauvignon blanc, and by 1979 other New Zealand winemakers were establishing vineyards at Marlborough.
Montana, which since 2001 has been a subsidiary of the world's second-largest wine and spirits company (the UK-based Allied Domecq), now has 2500 hectares of Marlborough vineyard and a huge winery and tourist and function centre at Blenheim.
In charge of its winemaking is a Roseworthy graduate Australian, Jeff Clarke, whom I remember well as chief winemaker at Tisdall wines at Echuca.
Montana is one of the biggest producers of sauvignon blanc in the world and its 2002 Reserve Marlborough is a super wine. New Zealand owes a great debt of gratitude to the company for demonstrating in the 1980s how well-suited Marlborough was to the variety.
Industry statistics show the dramatic growth of New Zealand winemaking. In 1992 there was 5800 hectares of vineyard across the nation. In 2002 Marlborough alone had 5731 hectares of vines.
The 2002 area of vines throughout NZ was 13,787, of which 3685 hectares was sauvignon blanc and a mere 307 was muller-thurgau.
By 2005 NZ is forecast to have 18,247 hectares of wine grape vines, 5519 of which will be sauvignon blanc. Marlborough will have 8217 hectares of vineyard, of which 4733 hectares will be sauvignon blanc.
© 2003 Newcastle Herald
