Fine Kiwi Wines
Newcastle Herald
Wednesday April 9, 2003
IT is ironic that that a sauvignon blanc produced by Australian winemaker David Hohnen and not the pioneer Montana company first rocketed New Zealand's Marlborough area to international fame.
As I outlined on March 19, Montana planted the first of a new generation of Marlborough vineyards on the outskirts of Blenheim in 1973.
A subsidiary of the world's second-largest wine and spirits company, the UK-based Allied Domecq, Montana is one of the biggest producers of sauvignon blanc in the world.
Today, Montana has 2500 hectares of Marlborough vineyard and a huge winery and tourist and function centre at Blenheim. But it was David Hohnen's Cloudy Bay 1985 Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc that first caught the imagination of Australian, European and American wine lovers.
David Hohnen, the founder of Cape Mentelle winery in Margaret River, became interested in New Zealand sauvignon blanc after tasting some samples offered by a touring party of New Zealand wine men.
The visitors were Hunter winemaker John Baruzzi (then winemaker for Penfolds New Zealand) and four companions, Ross Spence (Matua), Joe Babich (Babich), John Hancock (Morton Estate) and Kerry Hitchcock (Corbans).
Enthused by his initial tastings, Hohnen toured New Zealand in 1984 and persuaded his Cape Mentelle board to establish the Cloudy Bay operation at Marlborough.
Cloudy Bay quickly became an international cult wine. It was, declared David Thomas, wine writer for Britain's Punch magazine, ``New Zealand's finest export since Sir Richard Hadlee".
Further overseas recognition came in 1986 and 1987 when visitors to Britain's Sunday Times Wine Club Festival in London voted the Hunter's 1985 Sauvignon Blanc and 1986 Chardonnay the most popular of the show. Cloudy Bay and Hunter's in turn focused world attention on a wider spectrum of sauvignon blancs from Marlborough and from other New Zealand regions.
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.
MARLBOROUGH has had some setbacks along the way, the most serious coming in 1984 when the phylloxera vine louse was discovered in the area and slashed grape yields before growers countered by grafting their vines onto phylloxera-resistant rootstock.
Since 1979, a host of large and small wine producers have followed the trail blazed by Montana and established vineyards in Marlborough. French, German, Dutch and Australian-owned vineyards and wineries have added to the boom.
And I was fascinated to find a New Zealand gain and a Swiss loss at Marlborough.
Therese and Hans Herzog ran a vineyard and a Michelin star-rated restaurant in Switzerland before migrating to New Zealand and setting up their own boutique vineyard just outside Blenheim.
The couple produce some fine wines from their 10 hectares of pinot gris, viognier, chardonnay, montepulciano, merlot, caberenet sauvignon, cabernet franc and malbec vines.
Their adjoining Herzog Restaurant is, in my estimation, one of the finest in the Southern Hemisphere and makes me eager for another visit to Marlborough.
© 2003 Newcastle Herald
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