The Teece Museum in the Arts Centre is always worth a visit if you want to see how the ancient Greeks drank wine out of terracotta skyphoi and oinochoe. Their wine was so bad back then that they diluted it with water and used pine resin as a preservative. Not that modern retsina is much better.

The vine itself has changed little over the centuries, but new methods of making better wine have arisen with every successive vintage. After all, it wasn’t long ago that fermentation was seen as a divine mystery, and now we take it for granted to have it ever-present on a shop shelf.

I thought it would be a great time to look at some North Canterbury innovators who took huge risks pursuing greatness.

Here are three innovative wines that look back to go forward.

Pyramid Valley North Canterbury Orange 2020 | The late and dearly missed Mike Weersing searched all over New Zealand to find the perfect vineyard soils before planting in the limestone soils of Pyramid Valley. Mike was the first to make an ‘orange’ wine in New Zealand – he was both an innovator and an inspiration in the world of winemaking. This is a traditional style that’s been made in Georgia for millennia but had never previously been done in New Zealand. The white grapes are fermented on skins giving the wine its distinct orange colour and aromatics similar to amaro and tea. Under new winemaker Huw Kinch, these wines continue to lead the world in quality.

Black Estate Wildlife Pinot Noir 2020 | The Ancient Greeks used pine resin, and more recently, sulphur has been used as a preservative to stop wine from becoming vinegar. However, a few winemakers have used pristine fruit and highly skilled winemaking to enable preservative-free wines. Nicholas Brown from Black Estate has done this with quite a few wines, but one of my favourites is this juicy Pinot Noir fermented in giant clay amphorae.

Greystone Vineyard Ferment Pinot Noir 2019 | In 2012, the winemaker at Greystone, Dom Maxwell, wanted to see the difference in fermenting wine outside in the vineyard rather than inside the winery. Fast forward, and Dom managed to get a Callaghan Innovation grant for a PhD student from Lincoln University, Constanza Iversen, to study the unique wild yeasts of North Canterbury. This is world-leading work on what the terroir is at a microbial level. The resulting wine is made without new oak and is a fine, delicate, and pure expression of North Canterbury Pinot Noir.

Goethe’s famous bon mot is that “life is too short to drink bad wine”. Maybe we should refine that so we seek only to drink great wine – surely a worthy resolution to follow?

Greatness comes from those who seek to push the boundaries and risk their entire year’s work in pursuit of greatness. Cantabrians are often surprised how much has been achieved by these innovators and pioneers making wine in North Canterbury.

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