Dirk Richter of Weingut Max Ferd Richterin the Mosel talks to Austin Beeman about what makes Riesling so special. He makes some great points. A few years ago now, when I was working in Germany, I met Richter at his winery and he was kind enough to show me around, taste through all his wines and put up with my endless questioning. The wines were so beautifully balanced. Very knowledgeable and extremely passionate about German wine, the Mosel and Riesling. I found him very inspirational, it was a real ‘moment’ in my wine life.

Nearly 20 years of Sandihurst wine here, starting with the first vintage back in 1992. The label has come a long way with Hennie & Celia taking over from the Broughs after the third bottle and dropping the woodcut look. Interestingly I dont think that third bottle featured a vintage date on the front label, it must have been on the back.  The bottles are also interesting, Im not sure that lighter green hock style bottle is still available in NZ today. One thing that has remained though is our use of cork.

Thursday April 29, 2010
Venue: Design Exchange, 234 Bay Street, Toronto

Trade Fair: 2:30pm – 5:30pm
Public Fair: 7:00pm – 9:30pm
Consumer Ticket cost: $60.00

Discover the fabulous array of New Zealand wines, including SANDIHURST, now available for the Ontario market and enjoy your wine experience with a sampling of fine food and cheese.

The Sandihurst wines are our SAUVIGNON BLANC 2008, RIESLING 2007, and PINOT NOIR 2007

Click here to purchase tickets

Click here for a pdf showing participating wineries and wines

Jayson Bryant of Aucklands WineVault store in Grey Lynn reviews our Sandihurst Central Otago Pinot Noir 2007. He likes it and so will you.

So take a look and then, good people of Auckland, give Jayson a call and get a few for your cellar or dinner table.

You can even stalk Jayson if you like  – in his store, on Twitter, through his blog, his Radio Wammo slot or his WinevaultTV show.

Ive just been reading a post over on BevLaw.com  about ingredient labelling for wine. Given the increase in labelling requirements in the past few years this would seem to be a certainty at some stage in the future. It would be interesting to get some reader feedback/comment on this. Most other food and drink related products are required to have it so why should wine be exempt. This might really place the emphasis back on the winery to produce wine as naturally as possible as a lengthy ingredient list may make the wine look like it was concocted in a laboratory. There will definitely be some wineries who would fight this approach tooth and nail but I think wineries such as ourselves have a lot to gain. Bonny Doon above have perhaps stolen a march on everyone and full credit to them.

How say ye?

Another task in the vineyard at this time of year is to remove all the SECOND SET fruit. Basically the vine in its natural vigorous state is prone to producing additonal bunches of fruit at a later stage than the orignial time of fruit-set. Being later they therefore do not ripen to the same extent. At harvest time they will be underripe with low sugar levels and too high levels of acidity. We dont want them ending up in the wine. The problem is that to the untrained eye (and due to labour issues at harvest we often use such pickers) the bunches look very similar to the good stuff and could easily end up in the picking bin. We get rid of them at this time of year because they realatively undeveloped and are easy to spot. The good fruit, naturally larger, is going through veraison where colour changes and berry softening occur. The bad stuff is still green and hard and usually higher up in the canopy. A quick snip and its off.

A scene from the city of Talca in Chile, where Pablo Molinos, a good friend of mine and fellow winemaker, lives. It took me quite a while to find out that he and his family were OK which was a little worrying. But such is the age of technology that despite the city having no lights or running water at the moment he somehow still managed to post a message on his Facebook page! It must sounds like it was quite terrifying at the time. The destruction seems quite widespread, not least of all in the regions many wineries. Pablo was out here for the 03 vintage and came back again to Sandihurst recently when we hosted a group of touring winemakers from around Chile.

Recent historical evidence suggests that the viticultural practice of leaf plucking (in order to enhance fruit exposure) may have originated in Italian orchards towards the end of the 15th century. However, despite images such as the above Titian painting,  the practice of harvesting naked and of sending small children up the trees to reach the hard-to-get-at fruit is a theory that has now largely been discredited.

Soon to be released, our 2009 white wines. The Sandihurst Waipara Riesling is a wine in similar style to 2008 wine, a low alcohol wine with balanced moderate sweetness and vibrant acidity, and the Sandihurst Waipara Pinot Gris,  is a dry full flavoured wine with the accent on texture. Both of these wines are the first releases from my own vineyard which makes it doubly exciting.

In addition, in response to the exeptional quality of the vintage and in line with where we want our premium red wines to be, we have decided to extend the barrel maturation of our Pinot Noir 2009 by a few months and will be bottling this in June this year which will probably mean a release in time for Christmas. 2009, much like 2007, was a fantastic vintage both here in Waipara and in Central Otago and in the coming months there will be some superb wines being released. Naturally the big names like Felton Road, Mt Difficulty, Gibbston Valley, Muddy Water and Pegasus Bay will all have brilliant wines to release but I would urge you to seek out the lesser lights, the smaller less well known producers whose wines will no doubt be equally great and of course better value.

There is a story behind most wines – to the time to find it out, it makes the glass you are drinking all the more enjoyable.  

PS – I believe we are one of only a very small handful of producers using cork as the preferred closure with our aromatic white wines. Fromm and Prophets Rock come to mind – are there others, let me know???

A new breed of Riesling, an emerging trend over the last few years here in New Zealand. Lower levels of alcohol (10.5%), bags of flavour and beautiful balance.

And here is ours….Sandihurst Waipara Riesling 2008

For you wine geeks out there, the fruit for this wine is from Waipara, the major contender for NZ’s vacant Riesling-capital crown. Picked around 20-21 Brix, lightly pressed and only briefly settled (as to retain a high level of juice solids-important for extract) before fermentation was begun by the natural yeasts of the vineyard. No additions were made to this wine aside from a small amount of sulphur at bottling. The fermentation was allowed to proceed in tank without temperature control with peaks around 23C. The yeasts stopped work with residual sugar in the mid 20 g/L range, which was in lovely balance with the acidity of the wine. The wine then remained on full fermentation lees for 6 months to build some weight and texture. No fining and no cold stabilisation. Filtered and bottled in February 2009 and the bottle aged for a year prior to release to ensure it gets to you in the best possible shape. 10.5%alc, 23g/L RS, 7.5g/L TA and 2.95pH.

A beautiful style of Riesling that is really only possible in the cooler climates. I guess the Mosel would be the extreme case. There are a number of excellent examples around the country now. These are wines which need their own category at wine shows but as yet no show in NZ has done this to my knowledge. Also shows how great the Riesling grape is when you can make brilliant wines from such a range of ripeness levels, in a varied range of styles and all with the ability to age longer than most other whites. No Pinot Gris! even you cant do that.

Not a wine nerd? Fine,  then all you need to know is that this is a brilliant white wine, tasty, flavoursome, and delicious. Try one and you’ll be back for more, thats guaranteed !