The sky is always blue at Felton Road

Felton Road: The Green Heart of Otago

  “First day picking was at Cornish Point, several rows of Chardonnay. I got up in the dark, donned all my cycle gear, put my head-torch on, switched on my rear light and headed off to work. I can cut across a field and down a short little downhill trail before joining the road which turns to dirt track. It’s makes for one hell of a commute. I was first there so got the number 1 snips, which you have to guard with your life. Loose one and you’ll replace it and suffer beer fines in the pub on Friday. Leave it in the bucket where you place the grapes, and it goes into the press and you cause $4000 of damage, cost the winery several days and suffer the wrath of an Otago lynch mob. I was suitably scared as Gareth* gave us the pep talk that first morning, but also gradually lapsing into a sub-zero state. There was a frost on”

My first morning picking at Felton Road. I remember it vividly, rising early in my batch (Kiwi for holiday cottage), wrapping up warmly and heading out on Old Blue, my nickname for the mountainbike that had carried me down the West Coast to here. Out of the campsite onto the road, past the honesty box full of the potatoes I came to live on, then onto some wonderful dirt trails I had found a couple of days before. I ended that splendid commute racing along a dirt track next to the Kawarau River, famous for its jetboats and bungy jumps further along the gorge towards Queenstown. Here it was serene, flat as a millpond with mist rising from it catching the rays of the early morning sun. I was in heaven, on my way to Cornish Point a vineyard I consider one of the most beautiful in the world. It sits on a spur virtually surrounded by water, the Kawarau curving around it like an arm around a shoulder before the river meets the Mata-Au (Clutha), another river coming from Lake Dunstan at a spot called the Junction. Behind it Otago’s foothills rise up like a moonscape, testament to the region’s miniscule rainfall and desert status.

I was lucky to be there. When formulating my travel to New Zealand I had sent three emails enquiring after work, and I received a single reply, from Gareth King, head viticulturalist, inviting me to come and work the 2009 vintage with him. I did not need to be asked twice: Felton Road was royalty even back then, the leading light of a region that while still young had taken the world by storm, and done so in its most frenzied battlegrounds: world class Pinot Noir.

The grape is the most enigmatic and prized of all varietals. It is extremely terroir-expressive, and extremely fussy in which terroir it will grow. Its home and heartland is the villages and vineyards of Burgundy, where it forms a mosaic of subtly different styles and nuances that capture the imagination of wine enthusiasts arguably more than any other variety. But unlike Nebbiolo, a grape that inspires similar devotion, it has spread it wings and found new homes, like Russian River in California, Oregon, Tasmania and Central Otago.

Otago is a very young wine region. Trial plantings go back as far as the 1950s, and some experimental commerical crops were planted in the 1980s but in real terms its industry started to take shape during a surge in plantings in the early 1990s. Even so by 1996 it boasted just 11 wineries and a total of 92 hectares under vine, although a lot has changed since then, with hundreds of wineries dotting its stunning vistas, and thousands of hectares of vines. But even today despite all of that the vines are still young and the winemakers still honing their art, so it is a measure of the region’s unique terroir just how well the wines have done ever since they first hit the international markets.

Pinot Noir awaiting the schnips

And the frost that was slowing turning my fingers numb on that first morning is one of the main reasons winemaking came so late to Otago. It is the world’s most southerly wine-growing region and for a long time it was doubted grape-growing here could be made to be commercially viable. From my blog in 2009:

“Unseasonal frosts are one of the reasons that Otago was initially disregarded as a viable grape-growing region. They can strike in the spring or autumn and unchecked they can devastate the crop. Many of the vines are planted on north-facing slopes, which means the colder air drains away. On flatter sites the grapes may be sprinkled with water, which freezes around them and insulates them. Another way is to put blooming great propellers in the middle of the vineyards and they literally blow the freezing air away off the vines. These fire up maybe 4 or 5am when a frost is due and sound like a swarm of helicoptors. Close your eyes, put on a Doors song and and bang! you’re punching mirrors.”

There is a magic in Otago that cannot be denied. It lies on the same parallel in the southern hemisphere as Burgundy does in the north, the 45th, which perhaps begins to explain why Pinot Noir made a home here so readily. The air is clean and pure, the sky seems to go on forever, the rivers are clean and a deep azzuri blue. Its summers days are sunny and hot, its summer nights cool, its winters cold and snow-covered. In Aotearoa’s narrow landmass the influence of the sea is never far away except for Central Otago, making it the country’s sole continental climate. It is protected from the predations of the weather systems that build on the Southern Ocean and strike at New Zealand’s south and west coasts by the Southern Alps that stretch along the west. Beyond them on the strip of land between sea and mountain the average rainfall is over 7 metres and is home to a temperate rainforest. In Central Otago it can range from as low as 300 millimetres but never more than 600, and it is classified as desert. On a single day in Milford Sound further to the south I experienced rainfall of 484 mm in a single day: it was like being dunked into a lake. That is more than Felton Road gets in a year.

Grapes love these liminal landscapes. In easier climates they will give you plenty of fruit, big fat berries with thin skins and few seeds, perfect for eating, awful for making wine. You have to abuse the vine to get the best from them, make them send their roots deep to hunt for water and nutrients. You put the vines into survival mode, a plant’s equivalent of fight or flight, so they put all their energy into producing the best fruit they can: tight bunches of small berries, full of sugar, with thick skins and plenty of seeds. These are the most attractive to the agents that propagate them: the birds, who will spread their seeds far and wide.

Side-netting at Felton Road

Entire rows netted next door at Mt Difficulty

Except they do not. They are not allowed to. Birds are very much the enemy of Otago’s winemakers, and extreme measures are employed to protect the berries from their predations. All Otago’s vines are netted, which comes in three forms: side netting, row netting and vineyard netting. Side netting runs the nets along both sides of a row of vines around the fruit halfway up them, leaving the canopy exposed. It is the most sustainable and least intrusive to the biodiversity, but also the most expensive. Row netting has the entire row netted from top to bottom, and vineyard netting is when entire blocks of vines are covered.

“Felton Road favours the [side-netting] but that comes at a price. Firstly clipping the nets out and then unclipping them is the most labourious of the three. Then you have to run them. Of all the jobs during harvest, ‘running’ is probably the toughest, and reserved for the young Turks like Fabian and Andrew, as well as marathon runner Bruce. It involves teams of three, one driving the tractor while the other two run ahead and hold the unclipped nets out so they can be neatly wound back onto a large spindle at the front of the machine. On the long rows in the bigger blocks this is hard going, with a uneven surface to run on and the frequent slopes you have to contend with. Nets going over the canopy merely require a tractor with a raised spindle to reel them in. I’ve yet to see them taking in the nets over entire blocks but it is probably simpler still. So why all the hardship and expense? Because the bigger the net, the greater the impact on the microclimate, and the more intrusive you are on the developement of the grape and it’s interaction with the environment around it.”

And while the growers of Central Otago have a number enemies, like the non-native rabbits who gnaw the trunks and burrow among the roots, and wasps who will drink the berries’ juice, there is one hated above all, their bête noire. But it is no black beast but a small, pretty, gray and gold songbird with a silver ring around its eye. In Maori its called the Tauhou, we knew it as the Wax-Eye.

The Wax-eye, or Silvereye or Tauhou. Looks are deceiving: it is the devil.

Its hard to overstate just how hated these are birds by the vignerons of Otago, despite being so small and pretty. I feel I should slap a big ‘most wanted’ over the top of the picture. The problem with these birds that while others may steal a berry, the Wax-Eye will peck each berry once. One peck, then onto the next one, a single bird destroying entire bunches, a flock entire rows. Once the birds have done their damage it attracts the wasps who come and finish the job. Walking past a vineyard in Otago you will often see signs saying ‘Warning: Bird Scaring In Progress’. That is a euphemism for gangs of chaps with shotguns, but the Wax-Eye is cunning, simply flying out of range until the gunmen have gone.

And some of you will cry foul, especially as I try with my writing to promote sustainability and harmony with nature. But New Zealand is a country that is bedevilled with flora and fauna that is not native and affects the delicate natural balance of its eco-systems. The Maori name for the Wax-Eye, Tauhou, literally translates as ‘stranger’, the birds arriving from Australia in the 1850s. We joked amongst ourselves what the worst name for a wine could be: Château Bird-Peck came top. When push comes to shove you have to protect your crop.

“Oh yes grapes, been picking them for well over a week now don’t you know. Anyway who tells me I have never done a hard/honest days work in my life can officially fuck off. You pick up to 9 hours a days, with breaks for morning and afternoon smokos and lunch. So far we have picked chardonnay at Cornish Point, Riesling and Pinot Noir at Calvert and all three at Elms. And this includes the famous Block 3 there. And I’ve eaten them all. The variation in taste of the Pinot is particularly interesting: Calverts is sweet and jammy, while those of Block 3 are brooding with depth and intensity, echoes of the wine it is to become. We were told to be ‘less fussy’ in Block 3 because these are some of the best Pinot Noir grapes in the world. Gareth encouraged us to taste the shriveled grapes that we may have thrown away otherwise and they burst with roasted currant and raisin flavour. Not rotten or affected by bird peck, these are ever-so-slightly over-ripe and enrich the final product.”

The vineyard on that first morning, Cornish Point, is one of Felton Road’s four vineyard sites and was planted by owner Nigel Greening before he had bought Felton Road itself (there are some pre-Felton Road Cornish Points out there and I was lucky enough to have a 2004 example a couple of years back, but more of that later). It was the site of an old gold-miners outpost inhabited by Cornishmen at the height of the region’s gold rush in the 1860s before being abandoned in the late 19th century. By the mid 20th century it was an apricot grove before being bought by Nigel in 1998 and planted with experimental Pinot Noir clones and rootstocks, as well as a couple of blocks of Chardonnay.

There is no sorting table at Felton Road, the selection is all done at the vine, here cutting away rotten and raisined fruit

The other two I picked are Elms and Calverts. They have since added a fourth, MacMuir, in 2012. Elms is the home block, where the winery is located, named for the founder Stuart Elms who planted it in 1992. I asked Stuart how he selected the vineyard and he told tales of him and other early pioneers flying around in helicopters armed with topographical and ‘degree-day’ maps (maps of where the temperature got above 10 degrees, the magic number for vine growth) looking for the perfect spot. Stuart had made his money growing blackcurrants, a far more profitable crop (who doesn’t love Ribena!) and wanted to try his hand with vines.

He struck gold with Elms. The vineyards sits in a valley cut into the Bannockburn hills, the rear of it called Target Gully, where the National Guard practised shooting during the war. Above it lies the remains of Stewart Town, a settlement from the days of the region’s gold-rush, and an old dam the prospectors would use to sluice away the topsoils in search of gold. Elms is actually one of the few unsluiced vineyards there thanks to its deep soils the miners avoided, deeming them unlikely to cough up much gold for the effort involved. Their loss is our gain, as Elms is undoubtedly one of the best vineyards in Otago, New Zealand and the World. It is home to the flagship (and legendary) Block 3 and Block 5 Pinot Noirs, Block 2 and Block 6 Chardonnay and (my favourite) Block 1 Riesling.

I remember unclipping nets one crisp morning with Andrew, the Californian sommelier and philosopher. I have heard others since describe it so, but he was the first to call Elms the Grand Cru of Otago. There amidst the wines as the sun slowly crept up above the Pisa range to the west he waxed lyrical about how the rays are first to hit the vineyard in the morning, and the last to feel their warmth as they slip below Mt Difficulty (the montain not the winery) in the evening to the east. With its soils and aspect it really is so special, and Felton Road’s careful husbandry is a lesson in terroir-expression.

“They are one hell of a good bunch of people here and an eclectic lot. Kiwis of course, but Germans, French, Czech, Aussies, Brits, Yanks and Swiss all add to our melting pot. Some are on exchange programs, from vineyards in Muscadet, Burgundy, the Valais and California. Others, like me, asked and have been invited to join the merry crew. As Gareth said, we are here picking some of the best grapes in the world. I think he followed that by ‘so don’t fuck it up’ but it does feel like a real priviledge to be here.”

Block 3 Pinot Noir ready for the schnipping

Next up is Calverts planted with Pinot, Chardonnay and Riesling. It is on the Felton Road (the winery is named for the road) but further to the east and on the other side, next to the banks of Kawarau River. When I worked there the vineyard was leased by Felton Road from owner Owen Calvert and a portion of the fruit went to Craggy Range in Napier and Pyramid Valley in Waikari. I do remember a back-breaking day getting all the fruit picked for them and loading it up on large articulated lorries with refrigeration to get the fruit to the respective wineries as fresh as possible. Pyramid was not too far, across to the east of the South Island, but the fruit for Craggy Range faced a long overnight haul north and a ferry crossing to get to Napier. I believe now all the fruit is vinified by Felton Road and they have also outright purchased several of the blocks within. It is planted mainly with Pinot Noir with some smaller blocks of Chardonnay and Riesling (and a single errant Cabernet Franc vine).

MacMuir, the last vineyard, was merely the twinkle in Nigel Greening’s eye when I was there. At the time the land was also owned by the Calverts was not yet planted with vines, instead used to produce hay and straw for compost. Bought by Felton in 2010, it was planted exclusively with a variety of clones of Pinot Noir in 2012 after extensive soil preparation.

Martin, the Swedish sommelier with a penchant for Monty Python jokes, surveying the day’s work ahead

The estate make several different cuvées: top of the tree are the block wines from Elms made in tiny quantities from micro-terroirs within the vineyard. The Block 1 Riesling is picked on the last day of the harvest and is very much in an auslese style. Block 3 and Block 5 are superlative Pinot Noirs very much in the mould of a Burgundy Grand Cru (and they are not much easier to buy than DRC). Block 2 and Block 6 Chardonnays are amazingly pure expressions of the grape, one that Nigel believes is a real strength of New Zealand but often overlooked. These wines are usually sold via allocation only so you need to get cosy with your wine merchant if you want to experience them.

Below this are the three single-vineyard bottlings Calverts, Cornish Point and MacMuir, all Pinot Noir and all reflective of the individuality of their terroir. Not all of the fruit from each go into them: the blocks are vinified seperately then selected for how expressive they are with the typicité they look for, expressing each vineyard’s unique characteristics, with usually around 40% of the fruit going into the Crus.

Then come the Bannockburn wines. If the Blocks are the Grand Crus, the single-vineyards the 1er Crus then these are the village-level wines, to draw an equivalence with Burgundian hierarchies. There are four; Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and two Rieslings, and they are a blend of the fruit from the four vineyards that do not make it into the premium bottlings. They are made in exactly the same manner as the top wines, although the Pinot and Chardonnay will have a shorter élévage in barrel, 11 months ratther than 15.

You may be wondering why there are two different Riesling bottlings, especially as there is only around 3 hectares of it planted across the estate. One is labelled ‘Bannockburn Riesling’ the other ‘Bannockburn Dry Riesling’. The former is a spätlese-style Riesling, although not picked later. Instead the wine is cooled during fermentation, so not all of the sugar converts to alcohol, so the resultant wine has a lower strength (typically around 8-9%), a medium-sweetness and incredibly vibrant acidity. This is the wine that I would take to my desert island, it is just stunning. The Dry Riesling is just that, dry, where all the alcohol is fully fermented and result is steely, crisp and elegant.

A wine that you wish you could drink twice

Don’t get me wrong; Felton Road wines can be enjoyed young, with beautiful primary fruit but I am also a believer that time is what lets you truly see a wine’s soul. Personally from experience I would recommend at least five years for the Bannockburn wines and at least ten for the single-vineyard cuvées. As for the Block wines I feel like its asking how long is a piece of string, but unfortunately I have little experience of tasting truly mature Block wines beyong a 2003 Block 1 Riesling I tasted several years ago. I do have a lone 2004 Block 1 in my rack I have been saving, as I thought the 2003 still had plenty in the tank when I did try it.

Felton Road 2009 Bannockburn Pinot Noir tasted December 2024

A little reductive at first but once that blew away incredibly vibrant and complex. The perfume is redolent of violets, jasmine, morello cherry and black raspberry. There is a distinct freshness and vibrancy to the palate, with fine tannins providing some grip and succulent red berry fruit mingling with more savoury elements of sous-bois and game, with spice and black pepper emerging across the mid-palate and into the finish

Felton Road 2009 Bannockburn Chardonnay tasted Feburary 2025

Wow. Nigel wasn’t joking when he says Chardonnay often gets overlooked. One of the most profound white wines I have ever tasted, with a textural finesse coupled with a staggering depth of flavour that I can still taste today. Apple blossom, camomile, orange oil and toasted almond decorate the compelling nose. The palate is wonderfully concentrated, weighty but silk-like. Orchard fruit and lemon confit compete for your attention, merging deliciously with delicate white spice and a hint of fresh ginger, all incredibly pure and persistant. Perfection.

Cornish Point 2004 Pinot Noir tasted April 2023

I was convinced this tasting note would be more of a eulogy but was amazed at the freshness of the wine. Its perfume leaps from the glass with crushed strawberry, briar, wild rose with earthier hints of black truffle and dark spice. The tannins are melting, framing the delicious core of red berry fruit, with intrigue coming in the form of cedar, cardoman and strudel with a fine mineral edge and lively acidity. Surprisingly fresh with a hauntingly long finish of spiced berry and plum. Wonderful.

They have experimented with different closures including traditional cork but quickly determined it had little influence and settled on screw caps, with only the magnums by neccesity getting a diam cork. This certainly is a factor in how fresh even the older wines taste, but it is still impressive how well these wines mature especially when you consider the relative youth of the vines. Really only now are the oldest vines in Otago approaching the average age of vines in Burgundy, and they are a in a small minority. The fruit will improve as a vine ages; smaller berries, greater concentration of flavour with more complexity, but with lower yields. Really with each vintage they get a fraction better, and it is fascinating to experience it and to see in the future just how good these wines can become. It certainly speaks volumes about the precocious nature of the terroir in Otago that they are (and have been for a while now) producing world class Pinot Noir from relatively callow vines.

I think I can count of one hand the number of 20-year-old wines sealed with a screwcap I have tasted, and I think they are all Felton Road. There is a marked difference to what I would expect from a cork-sealed one. There it is the slow interplay with the tiny amounts of oxygen that enter through the cork that is the major protagonist, but tasting older wines under screwcap you certainly feel it is a much reduced factor, almost reminiscent of the non-oxidative ageing from extended batonnage practised at Daniel-Etienne Defaix. You get an incredible alchemical transformation in bottle, with the concentration and weighted texture underlining the complexity of fruit, but the wines are remarkably fresh and lack the oxidative characters I would expect from a cork equivalent.

The beehives at Cornish Point

So why the green heart? These days there is so much talk of sustainability when it comes to winemaking from almost every quality-conscious producer, but back then you did not hear it nearly as much, and for me Felton Road is patient zero. It was the first time I was hearing the philosophy of ‘the work is done in the vineyard’. Here at Felton Road it is all about the soil and by getting the soil in an optimal state you create a domino effect: incredible fruit at harvest, and incredible wine at bottling. There is a singular truth at the heart of making wine: no matter what tricks you employ in the winery, without great fruit you are not making a great wine. At best you can just cover up some flaws, disguise a lack of fruit with little wooden jackets for example, as Olivier Bernard of Domaine Chevalier put it to me once.

To get those soils in prime condition Felton Road was an early adopter of biodynamic principles. Biodynamics is a deep rabbit hole to disappear down and not without its controversies, a pseudo-science that draws easy comparison as homeopathy for plants. The clue of course is in the name, treatments that give dynamism to the vines, or more specifically the soil. It is intended to promote the microbiotic life within the soil, the opposite of herbicides and pesticides which strip it away. From my blog in 2009:

Instead of chucking toxins at a plant to ensure good health, biodynamics is a sympathetic approach that adds compounds that auger the vine’s weaknesses and and energises (makes dynamic) it’s strengths. It’s the making of these compounds that gives biodynamics its rather quirky reputation. There are nine in total, numbered 500 to 508. I won’t bore by listing them but the most common are the first two, 500 and 501. 500 is cow manure which is stuffed into a cow’s horn and then buried into rich soil during autumn, before being retrieved in Spring. 501 is powdered quartz again placed ina  cow’s horn and buried from spring to the following autumn. Both are added in very small, homeopathic-esque amounts to water and then sprayed onto the vines. You were warned.

And that is just scratching the surface, I referred to it as organic farming if it was done in Middle Earth. But the debate about its benefits ends when you consider who is using it. There is a strong pragmatism to the Kiwi mindset, and few embody that as much as Gareth King, viticulturalist extra-ordinaire at Felton Road. When you have boots on the ground and you are able to visibly see the effect those treatments have on the vines you are not going to argue with it. And Felton Road are far from being alone in fine wine producers utilising it; Pontet-Canet, the great Pauillac ‘flying’ Fith Growth famously uses it, and only allows horses in their vineyards. Michel Chapoutier, widely regarded as a winemaking visionary and one of the finest on the planet, employs it throughout his varied estates. Respected producers Zind-Humbrecht in Alsace and Domaine Leflaive in Puligny-Montrachet are also adherents. I suspect not many can tell you exactly how it works, just that it works, and that is enough.

But the philosophy at Felton Road goes beyond that. While not quite the total ‘laissez-faire’ of the natural winemaking movement, at Felton they try to be as non-interventionalist as they possibly can be, as every human interaction is a distortion of the natural process. But there is always a practical element to it, and it is a delicate balancing act to get it right. Each vineyard has a full-time team looking after it, and vines are inspected on a daily basis to be able to react quickly to any change in their condition. Fermentation is always spontaneous using wild yeasts already present: if it is slow arriving they may warm the juice slightly to encourage it, but they always keep a bag of yeast on hand just in case, although they have never had to use it.

Winemaker Blair Walters punching down the freshly harvested fruit

To walk that razor’s edge every vintage, and to produce the simply sublime wines they do takes talent. I always saw Felton Road as a three-headed beast: owner Nigel Greening’s vision, winemaker Blair Walter’s nous, and viticulturalist Gareth King’s industry that combine to create something that is somehow more than the sum of the parts. We could get into the technical details of the processes; the pruning, the trellising, the soil types, the clones and the rootstocks, the whole bunch fermentation, the gravity-fed winery, but it only goes some way to explain the delicate equilibrium that is serenely achieved year after year.

I picked with Didier, a French chap from Beaune who expressed amazement at the paucity of the canopy of the vines compared to his native Burgundy, at odds in his experience with the intensity of flavour the berries achieve. Back in 2009 I asked the vineyard managers Nick and Sarah what they thought the different may be. They could not say exactly, the southern sun they suggested. But of course it comes back to that most French of concepts: terroir.

And terroir is far from an exact science. There is a degree of happenstance to it: you could not have predicted just how well Sauvignon Blanc took to the soils and sunshine of Marlborough, creating a tropical, exuberant style that sits in sharp contrast to its heartland in the Loire valley, where the wines are typically more austere and mineral driven. If you are making Pinot Noir in the new world then comparisons with Burgundy’s Côte d’Or is inevitable, but like with Sauvignon Blanc in Marlborough there is an inescapable divergance in styles, with Otago’s Pinots bolder, more fruit-driven and with highers degrees of alcohol. You see similar tales where grape varieties have found new homes in the new world that nurture them in completely different and delightful ways: think Syrah in the Barossa valley, Malbec in Mendoza, Cabernet Sauvignon in California, and Chenin Blanc in South Africa.

Here in the UK we have always been a sponge for wines from the rest of the world. So we have always been on the outside looking in, and in my time in the industry it has been glorious and fascinating to see the winemaking in the new world innovate, evolve and mature as their vignerons gain better understanding of the vine’s relationship with its environment, adopting more sustainable husbandry in the process, and picking earlier for greater elegance, freshness and lower degrees of alcohol.

That is not to say the old world has sat on its hands, despite a traditional inertia to change. If you read my profile on Léoville-Barton I talk about the dramatic revolution in the Médoc, embracing modernity in both vineyard and cellar. And the two are not mutually exclusive, instead there is a more symbiotic relationship. Producers in the new world have inevitably been informed by practises from Europe, their diaspora clutching their cuttings of vines from home as they ventured into the unknown. And the learning curve they faced there has created an feedback loop as information constantly gets exchanged and practises in both are honed and perfected.

And a key mechanisms for that exchange I was experiencing picking at Felton Road: people. Students from all around the world, sons and daughters of vignerons sent out to experience new wine cultures and to bring that back with them, a constant churn of ideas and innovation. We had apprentices from the Mosel, Muscadet, the Valais, California and Beaune all learning from the practises at Felton Road.

And for me, from my experience there in the green heart of Otago, it is the people that complete any discussion of terroir. They are the vector through which terroir is expressed, their vision and industry that realises it. At Felton Road there is some local rivalry with their immediate neighbour Mt Difficulty, they even share Target Gully with Felton, but at the time the approaches were oceans apart. Mt Difficulty had just introduced a second label, Roaring Meg, and as they struggled to process that in the winery they had to leave the fruit from their premium sites hanging on the vine. It is something that would never be allowed to happen next door: Felton Road farm 32 hectares with no plans to add more, and no intention to dilute their principles with lesser, more commercial wines.

Being there, living that harvest under that blue sky with those amazing people was just a glorious experience, forging friendships I cherish to this day. I was not there long, but sometimes when the sun shines so brightly on you, even for the briefest of times, it will cast the longest shadow.

I will end with my favourite anecdote. As my bike was my only source of transport I was always on it and always in my bike gear (no lycra, it was a mountainbike) so I became locally referred to as ‘the cyclist’. I told that to Stuart Elms, the founder and owner of significant wit and his reply was ‘well you look like a cyclist….just not an Olympic one’. Whakawhetai koe Stuart, Nigel, Gareth and everyone else that shared the 2009 ‘Credit Crush’ harvest with me.

“Wednesday will see the traditional early finish after the picking of Block 1 Riesling (always the last to go) before another lunch cooked by Nigel (the owner) before the rest of the day spent in the pub. I will endeavour to pace myself. Talking of lunch from Nigel, he’s down 3 or 4 so far. Add to that the BBQ cooked by Owen Calvert on the last day of picking at Calverts, factor in the fresh coffee and food we get at smokos prepared by Gareth’s wife Karen and the frequent glasses of wine sometimes at lunch or at the end of the day, times the keg of organic beer (Emmersons) tapped by Nigel after picking on Saturday and x equals one very spoilt bunch of pickers. I said as much to Andrea just as we tucked into lunch on Saturday, which is ironic because I got tapped on the shoulder by Mervyn afterwards and was told I would be leading the note of thanks to Nigel. I’m not given to public speaking but any nerves vanished when I thought of the people I was about to address: friends every one, even given the short time I had been with them. I can’t remember exactly my words, but I thanked him for the food and everyone else for the welcome, and said how spoilt we were and what a special place it was to be.

Nigel turned round and thanked us back immediately. He cited how Blair, the winemaker at Felton, had been to see a modern sorting table the day before but wouldn’t be buying one. Then he used a joke to illustrate his point: two men using a urinal, one finishes and washes his hands the other finishes and does not. The first reproachfully tells the other, ‘in my country we are taught to wash our hands’. The second one replies ‘well in my country we are taught not to piss on them in the first place’. Nigel’s way of saying why no sorting table is needed at Felton Road.

Unlike a lot of vineyards that are on the phone to contractors screaming at them for a picking team while the fruit turns, or rots, or is eaten by birds, Felton Road has a crew of dedicated pickers, some of whom are here all year, some who come back every year and some, like me, make a pilgrimage to one of the finest wine estates in New Zealand. Felton Road’s position gives it the enviable luxury of being able to pick and choose….it’s pickers. It all works out rather neatly: Gareth runs the vineyards aided by his managers Nick, Sam and Sarah. One or two of them will pick with us, making sure the rows are getting picked evenly. Alongside them are the interns, full-time members of the staff often from vineyards abroad, like the Frenchies Manu and Marian from Muscadet, the mad Swiss Fabian and ze Germans Johanis x 2 and Stefan. There’s also Andrew the Californian ex-sommelier who is studying viticulture and his Chilean girlfriend Flor, who is a vet. In another time he would have been a warrior-poet and we have a good time discussing the more ethereal side of wine. Oh and Mister Mac, the heart. It is generally a mix of these that run the bikes, quads with small trailers that go up and down the rows, dropping off empty buckets in front of us and picking up the full ones behind. One person drives and the other picks up, and they swap jobs regularly during a session. The buckets are taken to the bins, big blue things that hold about a ton of grapes. On top are metal trays the grapes are poured into where Mervyn or Gareth with check through them. If there is too much botrytis, bird peck or second set (a later fruiting, not fully ripe) the message gets relayed by walkie-talkie to the manager leading the picking crew and we get shouted at (but not very loudly). We are an eclectic lot: there’s Stuart Elms and his sister Audrey. Stuart planted Elms, putting the first vines in in 1992 and producing its first vintage, and the vineyard is named for him. He picked the spot after studying maps of the soil and ‘degree days’, an average of the temperature during the growing season once it gets above 10, below which the vine won’t be up to much. To have picked this place, possibly the best vineyard in the area, is a real coup and I hope he is very proud. There’s Martin, the Swedish sommelier with a Monty Python obsession, Andre,  ‘ze German’ who loves beer more than anyone in my memory, Andrea, the American girl with a ready laugh and no volume control, and Ann, the eccentric German/Brit who I tease mercilessly. She asked Andrew, Nigel’s nephew who is a drum and bass DJ, what instrument he plays. When he told her he plays other people’s music but does make some himself, she asked ‘but how do you make music without an instrument?’. Love it.

  And Bruce the other Brit, who is possibly one of the most generous and genuine people I have come across. He shuttles me to the supermarket when I’m too cream crackered to cycle to Cromwell and has lent me two books, a history of New Zealand and one of the English Language. This way I manage to stay intelligent. Incredible but true. There’s also Nikki, who offers me lifts I can’t take when I’m freezing my arse off riding to work, because I wouldn’t be able to get the bike into the car. She also shows concern when I schnip myself, which has happened three times, two of them real bleeders, which require a lot of sucking and usually about 5 plasters. Think I’ll be left which some scars to remember this time by. And what a time. Most of the day picking is spent laughing, with the occaisional outbreak of grape wars which the Germans always start. They insist their innocence but we simply cite Poland.”

The 2009 Credit Crushers. I wish I still had that t-shirt

Last days at Calverts

Steady with the schnips

Sam and Bruce lead the way

Me, ze German and Flor

The American Girl

The Autumnal colours of Otago

Witten, with love, by A James Cole