Tasting Report: Central Otago Pinot Noir

If you positioned all New Zealand’s pinot noir growing regions around a volume dial, you’d find Central Otago somewhere up around 11. Everything about the place screams for your attention: the landscape, the people, the climate and, of course, the pinots.

The region is a hot bed of ambition, of skill and bravery, of sometime marginal viticulture and of pinots that have an amazing ability to seduce all comers. The intensity of fruit is the first captivating aspect of these wines, produced in an often arid, fast and hot growing season.

It is the most continental of all New Zealand’s pinot-growing regions of note, as well as the most elevated and most southerly, home to what are possibly the most southerly growing vines on the planet down south among the lunaresque landscape in Alexandra. 

The sprawling Central Otago region is actually composed of a number of very distinctive and disparate sub-regions placed amid a network of valleys, mountain ranges, lakes and rivers, all creating distinctive climate-driven characters. Soils are also a potent source of differentiation in the wines from alluvial sandy gravels to primary schist rock.

The development of greater structural articulation in terms of tannin has been a welcoming step in this region’s evolution, and if there was one place in New Zealand that was always going to reap a tangible benefit of maturing vines, it was Central Otago.

This has started to play out, and the ever-growing bank of knowledge and experience of the region’s winemakers, is also assuring the instant appeal of these great pinot wines. The 2013 vintage is a source of many, many great wines here.

Contributing Editor Nick Stock is a renowned Australian wine writer, author, presenter and filmmaker who reports on his worldwide wine tasting experiences for JamesSuckling.com.