5 days ago
Under the Radar New Zealand Wines to Seek Out Now
The modern history of New Zealand wine is surprisingly short, particularly here on the South Island, home to regions like Central Otago and North Canterbury that, in just a few decades, have shown themselves capable of producing stunning wines.
Only in the 1960s, at the same time Napa Valley in California was beginning its ascent, did New Zealand make it legal to drink wine in restaurants. In the 1970s, the government sponsored a program to transform vineyards, pulling out lackluster hybrid grapes that had been used to make cheap fortified wines, which accounted for the vast proportion of production, and to replace them with vinifera, the species of all the best-known wine grapes.
Still, by 1998, when Napa's cult cabernets were making themselves irresistible to wealthy consumers, only about 10 vineyards existed in Central Otago, a region better known for its access to winter sports in the mountain range known as the Southern Alps.
'Vineyards were met with a degree of incredulity,' said Duncan Forsyth, the proprietor of Mount Edward Winery in Gibbston in Central Otago, who arrived in the region in 1992 to ski and never left. 'There was a disbelief you could grow grapes.'
New Zealand today is best known for its sharp, pungent sauvignon blancs, particularly those from the Marlborough region in the northeastern-most part of the South Island. Those have proven wildly popular around the world, but they are most often mass-produced commodities and, to my mind, a rather limited calling card for a country capable of producing such distinctive wines.
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