Wine of the Week – Mature Villa Maria Chardonnay from my Cellar

The beautiful Wairau River in Marlborough, New Zealand.

Recently I had a wonderful wine experience. I was working at the Decanter Fine Wine Experience and Sir George Fistonich was there. Now George, if you do not know is one of the great figures in the world of wine.

Sir George Fistonich, the founder, owner and driving force behind Villa Maria. I took this photograph at the Esk Valley winery in Hawke’s Bay, which is also part of the group.

He founded Villa Maria, the famous New Zealand wine producer, in 1961 and owns it to this day. His achievements are amazing and from humble beginnings Villa Maria is now the largest privately owned winery in New Zealand, indeed it is the largest New Zealand owned winery in the country.

I have been involved with Villa Maria either directly or indirectly since 1987 and the wines are never less than good and frequently very good indeed. As a whole the range is very impressive and it is easy to see why it one of Drinks International’s Most Admired Wine Brands in the world. In addition George also owns the Vidal, Esk Valley and Te Awa estates in Hawke’s Bay as well as the Thornbury range, whose Central Otago Pinot Noir is one of New Zealand’s best value wines.

What I especially admire about Villa Maria is that they make wines that people really love and that have huge recognition among consumers, but are still keen to innovate and try new styles of wine and new ways of working. George led the charge on the move to screw cap seals for instance. That seems a long time ago now, but it was only 2004 in fact. Among much else they have also experimented, very successfully, with Albariño, Orange Wine and a new wine called Ngakirikiri, a super premium release is a Cabernet Sauvignon dominated blend from the Gimblett Gravels growing area in Hawkes Bay and it is a magnificent wine.

I was chatting away to George and commented that I had found an old bottle of Villa Maria wine in my cellar and asked if he was around the next day to try it with me. Well he was and so I brought the bottle in on the tube.

It was my last bottle of 1994 Villa Maria Reserve Chardonnay from Marlborough. I hadn’t kept it deliberately, but it was left over from a tasting about 20 years ago and I simply never got around to doing anything with it. The level looked pretty good, but the colour slightly worried me. It looked quite dark, although it was hard to tell through the green bottle.

Opening an old bottle of wine is always nerve wracking. How old is too old? I was certainly nervous about this one. Would it be oxidised and just too far gone to drink. Frankly at 23 years old it could well have been.

George in his early days – photo courtesy of Hatch Mansfield Agencies.

I opened it very slowly and very carefully, but even so the bottom quarter of the cork broke off and I couldn’t retrieve it, so it was rather un-stylishly bobbing about in the wine. However the rest of the cork was nice and damp and smelled clean, which made me more optimistic that all would be well.

I poured some into George’s glass before mine and together we inspected the colour and then sniffed the wine before taking a sip. First I felt a sense of relief that it was still alive after all this time, then a sense of joy that it was actually still quite fresh and bright, then feeling of exuberance because it was actually rather fabulous.

 

 

Wairau Valley vines

Map of New Zealand’s wine regions – click for a larger view – non watermarked PDF versions are available by agreement.

1994 Villa Maria Reserve Chardonnay
Villa Maria Estate
Marlborough – the label rather elegantly states “Marlborough Region”
New Zealand

One great thing about this bottle is that the back label is wonderfully detailed, unlike the current labels. So, I actually know a great deal about how this wine was made. It is a blend of 70% Waldron Vineyard and 30% Fletcher Vineyard fruit. The two vineyards are very close to each other in the Rapaura district of the Wairau Plains, the ‘Golden Triangle’. Waldron is a warm, stony site that produces full flavoured, richly concentrated fruit that makes for vividly fruity wines. Fletcher, farmed by Colin, Chris and Michelle Fletcher, is on especially low vigour stony soils.

According to the fabulously informative back label just 17% of the wine went through malolactic fermentation, which made sense once I tasted it and noticed the high acidity. The wine was aged for just 5 months in oak barriques (225 litre barrels).

The colour was a beautiful bright yellow, light toffee, slightly orange and peach skin sort of colour. The nose was good, yes there was a slight touch of oxidation, but also real honeyed richness of peach and pineapple with something fresh, stony and mineral together with a light touch of caramel and butterscotch.

The real surprise though came with the palate. It was overwhelmingly fresh with lively acidity making it seem positively youthful and playful. Those flourishes of richness, pineapple and caramel mainly were in the background with something nutty and spicy from the oak, while the stony fresh acidity was to the fore making the wine seem pure and mineral.

23 years in bottle had not dimmed the wine in any way. I remember it as being a very good wine at the time, but now, all those years later, it has developed into something that brought all the different strands of Chardonnay together perfectly – ripe fruit richness, judicial use of oak, cleansing acidity and minerality. It had become a great wine and tasting it was a wonderful experience.

Wairau Valley vines.

So you see, Chardonnay is a great grape variety – indeed personally I think that New Zealand should enjoy a higher reputation for its Chardonnays than its Sauvignon Blancs – and Villa Maria makes wines that age brilliantly – even for a long time in the less than perfect conditions of my “cellar” – into something complex and extraordinary.

There are many things to enjoy about wine, the freshness, the fruit, the direct pleasure are all important, but sometimes the complexity of an aged wine is more beguiling and fascinating, while the shared pleasure of a rare wine can be a truly memorable experience.

 

Wine of the Week – a great New Zealand Sauvignon

The view from the balcony at Villa Maria’s Marlborough winery.

I’ll be honest with you. I do not always enjoy drinking Sauvignon Blanc from the Marlborough region of New Zealand. Too many of the basic examples are a little too sweet, for a dry wine, dilute, overly tropical and somewhat one-dimensional.

However, I have always enjoyed good examples and was very excited by some of the Sauvignon Blancs that I tasted while I was in New Zealand recently. One in particular really captured my imagination and as I have discovered that it is widely available, I have made it my Wine of the Week.

Map of New Zealand’s wine regions – click for a larger view – non watermarked PDF versions are available by agreement.

2015 Villa Maria Single Vineyard Graham Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc
Villa Maria
Marlborough
New Zealand

I have known Villa Maria‘s wines pretty much my entire working life – I first sold them in 1988 – and they have always impressed me. At the very least they are reliable, pleasurable and never let you down. In fact Private Bin Sauvignon Blanc is probably the benchmark wine of the style. However, the good people of Villa Maria are very ambitious for their wines and constantly striving for quality and really do seek to make great wines.

Sir George Fistonich, the founder, owner and driving force behind Villa Maria. I took this photograph at the Esk Valley winery in Hawke’s Bay, which is also part of the group.

It helps I expect that the company is still privately owned by Sir George Fistonich, the guy who founded the company back in 1961 – his first vintage was 1962. Everyone I met at Villa Maria was, quite rightly, full of admiration for George and his achievements It seems that nothing stands still at Villa Maria for very long and the wines stand testimony to George’s belief in the quality that New Zealand can produce. He really is one of the giants of the wine business, a sort of New Zealand Gérard Bertrand, Robert Mondavi or Miguel Torres.

So, why did this Sauvignon capture my imagination so much? The Graham Vineyard is right by the sea near the Awatere River (pronounced Aw-wah-tree) where it empties out into Clifford Bay, south and east of Blenheim. It is a coastal vineyard, right on the seashore, and that really helps to regulate the temperature of the site, while the stony soils warm up quickly and retain that warmth to create wonderful ripeness. So you get a wonderful balance between warmth and cooling maritime conditions.

This little fella was basking on the beach just in front of Graham Vineyard.

Because of those conditions the wine seems to have more density than many Marlborough Sauvignons, more savoury and pungent aromas and flavours and to be only subtly tropical – which suits the grape brilliantly.

Seddon Vineyard, Villa Maria’s beautiful Seddon Vineyard is just inland down the Aware River a little way. This makes it more sheltered and so suits Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris more than Sauvignon Blanc, which enjoy the sea breezes at Graham.

The nose has hints of tropical fruit, but more tomato leaves, jasmine, oregano and something stony and slightly saline too. There are also the classic touches of gooseberry and citrus. The palate is quite rich and has real weight and intensity to it. The tomato leaves come back, as does the jasmine and oregano, together with nettles, a light touch of passionfruit, blackcurrant leaf, stony minerality and the refreshing acidity has a feel of orange sorbet about it, yet the wine finishes totally dry. This is wonderful stuff, complex and fine – 92/100 points.

A very versatile wine, it is a lovely aperitif, great with fish, oriental food or just about anything you can think of. If you think you know Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, think again and try this glorious wine.

Available in the UK from Majestic Wine Warehouse for £15.99 a bottle – £13.99 if you mix 6 bottles.
Fruit from Graham Vineyard is also used as part of the blend in the always excellent Villa Maria Clifford Bay Reserve Sauvignon Blanc.
Villa Maria wines are distributed in the US by Ste. Michelle Wine Estates.

Deliciously different & exciting white wines

There is so much wine available from so many different places that it must be hard for most casual wine drinkers to decide what to drink. Which is presumably why so many people I know stick to a very narrow range of favourites.

There is no need to get stuck in a rut though, even with tried and tested wine producing countries or companies. Here are details of four delicious and exciting, for different reasons, white wines that have come my way of late. At first glance on the shelf they might not seem all that different, the first two are from the famous and always excellent Villa Maria in New Zealand while the second pair are from Chile, one made by Álvaro Espinoza in the Casablanca Valley and the other by Errazuriz.

What sets these wines apart and makes them a little different and exciting is that they are made from slightly more unusual grape varieties, or in the Chilean case blends. I love championing less famous grapes as there is a great deal of pleasure to be found in many of them and so I think it is a great shame that so many drinkers limit themselves to such a tiny palate of grapes. There are hundreds of grape varieties out there and many of them can make very good wine indeed.

All it needs is to be slightly adventurous and try something new. I always tell my students that at least once a month they should buy a bottle of wine that they have never heard of or thought of drinking before, that way they experience lots of new things. In addition I tell them to buy at least some of their wine from a proper independent wine merchant, which can give advice and usually stock the more interesting things too.

It is so good that wine producers are still trying to offer consumers wines that are a little bit unusual and more interesting than the normal run of the mill wines that fill the shelves. Especially so as both New Zealand and Chile have long focussed on a narrow range of commercially successful grapes, so it is good to see such exciting experimentation. In recent months I have also seen Grüner Veltliner from New Zealand too, all we need is an Albariño, a Godello, a Fiano and a Falanghina and I will be a very happy bunny indeed!

Remember to click on all the links – and leave a comment too.

New Zealand

Sir George Fistonich at harvest time. George founded Villa Maria 1961 and runs it to this day. Photo courtesy of Ste Michelle Wines.

2013 Villa Maria Private Bin Arneis
East Coast G.I., New Zealand
If you have never heard of the Arneis grape variety before, well you can be forgiven as it is only a speciality of Piemonte in north west Italy. It makes the wines of the Roero Arneis D.O.C.g, and D.O.C. wines in Langhe too. In its native country it seems to make wines that are quite floral and aromatic, but is usually too low in acidity for me, so I am generally more keen on Nascetta or Gavi’s Cortese grape. Somehow it seems that the New Zealanders are able to compensate for this lack of acidity and produce fresher, more lively versions than the the original – just as they do with Viognier. Historically Arneis was considered very hard to grow as it is so delicate, hence the name which means ‘little rascal’ in Piemontese and so the grape almost died out in the 1970s with only two producers left by 1980. Luckily – as with so many white grapes – modern know-how has swept to the rescue and limited plantings are now found in Liguria and Sardinia, as well as California, Oregon, cooler parts of Australia and New Zealand’s North Island.
This wine has the East Coast Geographical Indicator, because the vineyards are in more than one region. In fact the grapes are grown at 3 vineyards sites between Hawke’s Bay and Gisborne.
Villa Maria’s Private Bin wines are their fruit forward more easy drinking range.
This offers a gently aromatic and slightly floral nose with touches of pear and very delicate peach.
The palate is juicy, delicately succulent and textured with soft acidity and lots of fresh and lively orchard fruit – pear –  and is nicely flowery too. There is also a fresh seam of acidity keeping the whole thing together and lively, without dominating.
All in all a really good approachable take on this grape making it a sassy and enjoyable easy drinking wine that goes well with almost anything, what’s more it only has 12.5% alcohol making it an ideal quaffer too – 87/100 points.

Map of New Zealand’s wine regions – click for a larger view – non watermarked PDF versions are available by agreement.

2013 Villa Maria Cellar Selection Sauvignon Gris
Marlborough G.I., New Zealand
Sauvignon Gris is a grape close to my heart. I became very fond of it in Chile over ten years ago and am very pleased that it is now being grown in New Zealand too. Sauvignon Gris is thought to be either an ancestor of or a mutant clone of Sauvignon Blanc – for some reason it is not clear which came first, which reminds me of a joke – and makes fatter and less aromatic wines than its more famous relation. In France they are historically blended together to give more texture and richness than Sauvignon Blanc would have on its own. Personally I think Sauvignon Gris is potentially a very interesting grape and others clearly agree as there appears to be renewed interest with this ancient grape in Graves and parts of the Loire. Sauvignon Gris can sometimes be found blended into the finer examples of Sauvignon de Touraine and is something of a speciality grape of the tiny Touraine-Mesland sub-region. The grape has a long history in Touraine and it is often referred to there by its ancient local names of Fié or Fié Gris or even Sauvignon Rose.
Villa Maria’s Cellar Selection wines are more concentrated, complex and so perfect with food. This particular wine is actually from a single vineyard in Marlborough’s Wairau Valley – Fletcher’s Vineyard.
The wine has a pale pear juice colour that hints at succulence, while the nose offers pear and delicately smoky peach.
The palate is by turns stony and peachy with a rippled texture of occasional fleshy succulence, nectarine lingers on the finish together with blackcurrant leaf and some tropical passionfruit too.
It is dry with a freshness of acidity and little cut of citrus too, but acidity is much less dominat than in Sauvignon Blanc, indeed in many ways it is like a bigger, fatter Sauvignon Blanc. A lovely wine with real finesse and elegance that will go with almost any fish or lighter dish perfectly – 89/100 points.

UK stockist information for Villa Maria wines is available from the distributer – Hatch Mansfield.
US stockist information for Villa Maria wines is available from the distributer – Ste Michelle Wine Estates.

Chile

Emiliana’s beautiful organic vineyards. Photo courtesy of Banfi Wines.

2012 Signos de Origen Chardonnay-Roussanne-Marsanne-Viognier
Emiliano Organic Vineyards
D.O. Valle de Casablanca, Chile
Casablanca is a beautiful place, one of the best bits of Chile to visit the wineries. this is because it is near both the main cities of santiago and Valparaiso and so is home to some excellent winery restaurants as well as some very good wine producers too. For a long time Casablanca was the undisputed premium white wine region of Chile, this is because the lack of mountains between it and the ocean ensure it is cooler than the wine regions to the south – like the Maipo and Colchagua Valleys. Nowadays Casablanca has competition from the equally cool San Antonio and Leyda Valleys as well as Acocagua Costa and Limari to the north, but is still a great region.
I love interesting blends and this is a wonderful combination of classic Rhône Valley white grapes – Roussanne, Marsanne and Viognier – with the more lush style of Chardonnay and it works perfectly. The grapes are organically grown and the grapes were partly fermented in stainless steel tanks at low temperatures before being moved to French oak barrels to complete the fermentation – this technique gives subtle richness and texture to the wine. 90% of the wine then aged in those barrels for 6 months, while 10% was aged in egg shaped concrete tanks, which are very trendy right now and do good things – you can read about them here.
This is a serious white wine with complexity, structure, texture and finesse.
The fruit drives it with rich apricot and peach characters giving succulence and texture as well as the fresh herb characters of the Rhône grapes. Ripeness and oak give honey and nut tones too and an overarching richness, even a touch of oatmeal at times. There is freshness and stony minerality too though giving some tension and balance.
A glorious wine, dense, concentrated and fine, perfect with cheese, rich poultry or pork – 91/100 points.

UK stockist information is available from the distributer – Boutinot.
US stockist information is available from the distributer – Banfi Wines.

Map of Chile’s wine regions – click for a larger view – non watermarked PDF versions are available by agreement.

If you want to try Rousanne, Marsanne and Viognier without Chardonnay, try another great Chilean blend:

2011 Errazuriz The Blend Marsanne-Roussanne-Viognier
Viña Errazuriz
D.O. Valle de Aconcagua, Chile
Another thrilling blend from grapes that originate in France’s southern Rhône. This comes from a little further north than Casablanca in the Aconcagua proper – Casablanca is politically a sub-division of the Aconcagua Valley – about halfway between the cool Aconcaua Costa and the warmer eastern end of the valley where Errazuriz traditional produce their red wines.
25% was fermented in third use French oak to give delicate richness while the rest was fermented in stainless shell to give freshness. 25% was also aged for 6 months in French oak.
This wonderful wine has a rich, earthy nose with wild herbs, honey, rosemary, spicy toasty oak and nuts too, it is savoury but with rich underlying fruit.
The palate is succulent with rich juicy fruit and a touch of minerality and acidity keeping it fresh not cloying. Herbs, apricots, peach, stones, a touch of oily texture and even cream together with a bite of tannins and nuts on the finish. Another glorious and exciting wine that is perfect with roast pork or rich poultry dishes – 91/100 points.

UK stockist information is available from the distributer – Hatch Mansfield.
US stockist information is available from the distributer – Vintus.

So you see, there is plenty of excitement and lots of different, but still delicious, wine out there if you are prepared to be a little adventurous. There really is no need to get stuck in a rut or keep drinking the usual suspects.

In the interests of full disclosure I should tell you that I do some work for both Villa Maria and Viña Errazuriz from time to time. However, the views that I have expressed about their wines are completely honest and unsolicited.