New Zealand Annual Tasting Report: Standing Tall in the Vineyard

In our recent Top 100 Wines of New Zealand 2024 report, which we posted in December, I wrote that New Zealand has never made so many world-class wines, but the only problem is that most of them are very limited in production. For example, our New Zealand Wine of the Year was the Bell Hill Chardonnay North Canterbury Single Parcel Limeworks 2020, a monumental white that tastes like a great white Burgundy but has the added dimension of its unique cool-climate terroir. It’s a perfect wine and rated 100 points, but only a hundred cases are produced.

“Our soils are unique, to say the least,” said Marcel Giesen, the owner of Bell Hill who with his wife, Sherwyn Veldhuizen, cultivates a few hectares of chardonnay and pinot noir about an hour’s drive from Christchurch in the South Island region of Canterbury. “They are very diverse for such a small place.”

However, literally hundreds of other wines from New Zealand showed unique character and extremely high quality in our tastings of more than 1,000 offerings in 2024. It was out biggest annual tasting of the country's wines ever, with Associate Editor Ryan Montgomery and I tapping into most of the wines in New Zealand during a number of trips there last year.

I can’t emphasize enough that the real quality wine story in New Zealand is not sauvignon blanc, despite a number of outstanding bottles from such wineries as Clos Henri, Blank Canvas and Vavasour. It’s still very annoying to hear people ask if New Zealand makes anything other than sauvignon blanc. Personally, I am often asked if I make sauvignon blanc in Martinborough even though only pinot noir is planted in my tiny vineyard.

It doesn’t help that three out of four bottles produced in New Zealand are sauvignon blanc, with literally millions of cases of the wines exported around the world. According to the New Zealand Wine Growers Association, the equivalent of approximately 379 million bottles of wine in total were made in 2024, with about 265 million of those being sauvignon blanc.

I am still convinced that the most compelling quality wines from the island nation are made from chardonnay and pinot noir. This plays in nicely to the global demand for pinot noir, particularly those with lower alcohol levels of between 12 and 13.5 percent. There aren’t many other places in the world that can replicate this. Even cool-climate wine areas in Germany and Oregon have a hard time making top-quality pinot noir at those alcohol levels. Burgundy currently seems to be only able do this in cold and wet vintages. By comparison, hot and dry years such as 2019, 2020 and 2022 made dark and high-alcohol reds in Burgundy.

What’s interesting is that many New Zealand winemakers are no longer trying to emulate their Burgundian counterparts, particularly with the way recent vintages are showing from the France’s legendary Cote d’Or. As much as they buy, drink and visit Burgundy, they understand that their wines in New Zealand are distinctly different.

“We still drink Burgundy but it isn’t what we want to do,” said Austin Black,  a winemaker at Prophet’s Rock on the South Island in Central Otago. “I definitely feel that has changed over the years.”

Black, who makes wine with Burgundy native Paul Pujol at Prophet’s Rock, pointed out that he and others are much more interested in fine-tuning their viticulture rather than focusing on stylizing wines in the winery. “It’s less about personalities and more about what is happening in the vineyard.”

Added Daniel Ah-Loy, vineyard manager of Fromm winery in Marlborough: “My chardonnay must express the vineyard. That’s it. It’s so important. And it’s all Mendoza clone. The wines that come off there have real tension with the ripe flavors. And you have the firm and phenolic finish as a complement.”

Indeed, as I noted in my Top 100 wines of New Zealand 2024 story, acknowledging vineyards appears to be more and more important today within the narrative of New Zealand wine. The country’s best winemakers are much more focused on making vineyard-driven wines. As proof, several of the top 10 New Zealand wines from 2024 were from single vineyards, including the Bell Hill Limeworks 2020, the Terra Sancta Pinot Noir Central Otago Bannockburn Mysterious Diggings 2022, the Felton Road Pinot Noir Central Otago Block 5 2023 and others.

There are even initiatives in some regions to publicize and define subregions and vineyards, such as the ambitious project of Appellation Marlborough Wine, which was started in 2018. It divides the appellation into three key subregions, including Wairau Valley, Awatere Valley and Southern Valleys, based on soils and microclimates.

The world of New Zealand wine is always changing, and it’s producing some of the best-value, high-quality wines in the world. Plus, it’s impressive how many great and diverse wines represent good value, particularly those priced between $30 and $60 a bottle. Many deliver high quality that would cost two or three times more from other parts of the world. I just wish more of these wines were made and they were more readily available to all of us.

– James Sucklling, Editor/Chairman

Note: You can sort the wines below by vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.