How New Zealand thinks about wine

Vines arrived early - Samuel Marsden planted some at Kerikeri in 1819, and James Busby was making wine at Waitangi in the 1830s, which the French explorer Dumont d’Urville tasted and politely approved. Then almost nothing happened for well over a century.

Three obstacles, none of them agricultural. A powerful temperance movement - organised campaigning against alcohol altogether - kept licensing hostile for decades. Six o’clock closing, in force from 1917 to 1967, produced the "six o’clock swill" - an hour of frantic beer drinking after work - which isn’t a culture in which anyone develops an interest in Chardonnay. And phylloxera, the same root feeding aphid that wrecked Europe, plus a national preference for fortified wine, kept plantings small and quality low.

What kept wine alive through all that was largely one immigrant community. Dalmatians from the Croatian coast arrived from the 1890s to dig kauri gum in Northland, and as the gumfields gave out they moved into growing and making wine, mostly in West Auckland. The founding names are theirs: Josip Babich, selling wine from 1916, then Nobilo, Selak, Delegat, and the Yukich family, whose company became Montana. When the industry finally moved, it was one of those firms that moved first. The turn came in the 1970s. Licensing liberalised, restaurants got wine, and growers started planting classic varieties in places nobody had tried. In 1973 Montana planted Marlborough, a district then thought too cold and too windy for grapes, on land bought cheaply from sheep farmers. Within 15 years it had redefined a global variety.

New Zealand makes a little over one percent of the world’s wine and is consistently among the highest earning per litre. That’s the whole strategy, stated plainly: it can’t compete on volume, so it doesn’t try.

Broken down by variety, the shape of it is the whole industry in a few rows.

Put another way: 82% of every white vine in the country is Sauvignon Blanc, and 75% of every red vine is Pinot Noir. Three quarters of the Sauvignon Blanc is in Marlborough alone. Syrah - the variety I would argue is New Zealand’s most underrated red - sits near the bottom on under 500 hectares. Only the first row is a figure the Register states directly; the rest are rounded, and the percentages are mine.

The first was screwcaps. Frustrated by cork taint - the musty, wet cardboard smell a contaminated cork leaves in the wine - ruining wines built on clean aromatics, New Zealand producers formed the Screwcap Initiative in 2001 and moved almost the entire industry across within a few years. It was commercially risky - screwcaps signalled cheap wine at the time - and it turned out to be simply correct. Australia followed; much of the world eventually did. The evidence arrived afterwards and settled it. The Australian Wine Research Institute put thousands of bottles of a single 1999 Semillon under 14 different closures and tasted them for a decade. At 10 years the screwcapped wine was still fresh and drinking well; most of the bottles under cork had oxidised, several of them past drinking. The more useful finding wasn’t taint but variation: corks differ from each other in how much air they let through, so a case sealed with cork ages at a dozen different rates, and a case under screwcap ages at one. That’s the real argument. A screwcap doesn’t just avoid a fault - it makes the bottle in your rack behave like the bottle you tasted.

The second was sustainability certification. Sustainable Winegrowing New Zealand covers almost every producing hectare in the country, and a grower outside it will struggle to export at all. People argue about whether the standard is strict enough. Nobody argues about how many growers are in it.

A long thin country stretching roughly from 36°S to 45°S, never more than about 130 km from the sea, with a mountain range down the middle. That means maritime, cool and windy nearly everywhere, with long slow ripening seasons and enormous day to night temperature swings.

Slow ripening builds aroma while holding acid, which is exactly the condition aromatic white varieties and Pinot Noir want. It’s the single fact that explains why New Zealand is good at what it’s good at, and why it has never made a convincing Grenache.