Sometimes I feel like a character from James Hilton’s Lost Horizon when I visit some of the best wine producers in New Zealand. But it’s not about finding Shangri-La – it’s about discovering remarkable wines from pristine vineyards farmed organically and regeneratively, producing wines of striking precision and refinement.

Take, for example, my New Zealand Wine of the Year for 2025: the Terra Sancta Pinot Noir Central Otago Bannockburn Mysterious Diggings 2024. It’s a fresh and characterful wine with precision and focus, delivering a crisp, crunchy palate with ultra-fine tannins. It’s a wine for today’s wine lover who appreciates youthful reds that energize the palate.

It also comes from eight hectares of Dijon-clone pinot noir planted on its own roots in one of the most beautiful and regenerative vineyards in New Zealand. It was a discovery for me, and I was awe-inspired visiting the vines and drinking the wine about a month ago at the winery. It sells for the equivalent of about US$20 in New Zealand, and a few thousand cases are made. Terra Sancta doesn’t have an importer in the United States – at least that was the case a few weeks ago.

I couldn’t help but award another Terra Sancta pinot a spot in the Top 10 this year: the Terra Sancta Pinot Noir Central Otago Bannockburn Slapjack Block 2024. It's a perfect wine at No. 9, only because it’s limited to 300 cases and under $100 a bottle. It's from another vineyard of ungrafted vines from Dijon clones that were said to have come from cuttings bootlegged from Burgundy’s Chambertin before biosecurity became stringent in New Zealand.

The wine was served to my wife, Marie, who in her former life was a wine merchant specializing in Burgundy, and she thought it was a “Chambertin, maybe from Armand Rousseau.” It showed spectacular depth, structure and power, yet it was refreshing and polished. It reminded me of great Burgundy from the 1990s, when I was covering the region for The Wine Spectator as a senior editor.

Both wines are tributes to the unique landscape and soils of their part of Central Otago in New Zealand’s South Island. The rugged, glacial-carved hills and terraces of mostly schist and sand soils, with strong rivers and deep lakes, remind me of parts of the American Rockies in states such as Montana or Wyoming. The soils for vines are low in nutrients and organic matter, which is why the best producers always work hard to improve the topsoil to help their vines thrive. Terra Sancta’s viticulture is spectacular – low-impact farming and natural nurturing, from using their own sheep in the vineyards to no-tilling or grass cutting. They improve the life of their vines while reducing their CO₂  footprint.

However, all this care for their vines and the ultimate stellar quality of their grapes and wines is also amplified by what was perhaps a new benchmark vintage in New Zealand winemaking – 2024. This may be the greatest year ever, although some winemakers are touting 2025 instead. The duo seem to be a remake of 2020 and 2021.

“2024 is really excellent, but 2025 is the best ever,” said Paul Brajkovich of Kumeu River, who is arguably the best white wine producer in the country. He said the growing season was very similar in both years, but the fruit set was better in 2025 and produced more outstanding quality wine. Let’s judge the two vintages in the bottle. I can’t wait.

It’s not often that weather patterns are excellent on both islands, and 2024 was just that. It was mostly hot and dry during the growing season, and grape yields were down for just about everyone. This made clean, ripe and beautiful grapes, both red and white. Wines across all spectrums of the market are of excellent quality. This is a vintage to buy across the board in Kiwi wines. I still have not tasted many 2025s.

In fact, six wines in my Top 10 were from 2024, including the two Terra Sancta wines. The others are the Felton Road Pinot Noir Central Otago Cornish Point 2024 (No. 2), Kumeu River Chardonnay Kumeu Mate’s Vineyard 2024 (No. 3), Bilancia Syrah Hawke’s Bay La Collina 2024 (No. 4), and Te Mata Chardonnay Hawke’s Bay Elston 2024 (No. 8).

“We regard 2024 as very similar to 2023. It was an excellent back-to-back set of vintages,” said Blair Walter, the head of Felton Road Winery, which is also based in Bannockburn, just down the road from Terra Sancta. “The growing seasons were very similar – the fruit at harvest and how the grapes responded in the winery and in barrel.

“It is early days for 2025,” he added. “It was average in the growing season. Climatically, 2024 and 2023 were very similar, with hot growing seasons in the beginning, warm and dry periods through January and February, and then very cold at the end.”

It’s clear that 2023 was a very good vintage in the South Island compared with the North Island, which was hammered by a cyclone in mid-February, mostly in Hawke’s Bay and Gisborne. The rest of the island had heavy rain before the harvest and cold, gray weather. But even then, some producers, such as Te Mata in Hawke’s Bay, made excellent wines.

“It started drying out by the second week of March,” said Phil Brodie of Te Mata Estate. They made their coveted Bordeaux blend, Coleraine, in 2023. “We made all of our showcase wines. We were about 50 to 60 percent down. It was about getting some ripe flavors in the wine.”

There are 30 wines from the 2023 vintage on this list. Most are indeed from the South Island, with the top being the No. 7 Rippon Pinot Noir Central Otago Tinker’s Field 2023 – a tiny-production, single-vineyard, own-rooted pinot noir. Rippon is a bucket-list winery to visit on the ancient glacial lake of Wanaka. The Sato Chardonnay Central Otago La Ferme de Sato Les Blanches 2023 is very close in quality and totally handmade by the husband-and-wife team of Yoshi and Kyoko Sato.

Equally tiny and unique is the pinot noir of Bell Hill, a small producer owned and made by Marcel Giesen and Sherwyn Veldhuizen in North Canterbury. The 2021 ranks this year at No. 6 – a superb red and a fine follow-up to its Chardonnay Single Parcel Limeworks 2020, which was my Wine of the Year last year. The estate makes only a few hundred cases of its handful of chardonnays and pinot noirs. It just launched a new small line of wines under the Further Afield label, including a chardonnay and pinot noir from the respected Clayvin Vineyard.

As I noted in my Top 100 Wines of New Zealand 2024 report last year, the very best wines from this island nation are made by small, hands-on producers with a dedication to viticulture and winemaking, and with integrity and vision rooted in their unique ecosystems and vineyards. The top wines on my list certainly illustrate the possibilities in the country to make distinctive cool-climate offerings that have become harder and harder to find in the world, thanks to the struggles brought by climate change. I sincerely hope you can find some of these bottles to try yourself and understand their distinction.

– James Suckling, Editor & CEO

The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated over the last 12 months by the JamesSuckling.com tasting team. 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.