THE FAMILY PORTRAIT
Over the years our family has grown. Like most parents, we are terribly proud of our children, even though we can't claim that they are always perfectly behaved and are free of warts and wrinkles. So far we have only named four, although it is not to say we have hung up our spurs. They are Maestro, Prima Donna, Aria and Finale. Being the eldest, Maestro likes to take over when he gets a chance. Prima Donna can give a first class performance but has a reputation for being highly strung. Aria is consistently a sweet little thing while Finale good naturedly rounds everything off.
We wanted to have a family portrait of our lovely little mites while they were still young so we commissioned Shaun Martin to do the honours. Don't they look angelic?
HAMMER AT PEGASUS
We recently had a pleasant surprise when one of the world's great wine personalities, Michael Broadbent, on a brief private trip to New Zealand, visited us at Pegasus Bay. In 1996 he persuaded Christies of London to mount the world's first international fine wine auction and he has been responsible for running this famous event since. He also writes a regular column in Britain's Decanter wine magazine and is author of many wine books. It sounds romantic, doesn't it? He assures me, however, that it has its more taxing moments and just before coming to New Zealand he spent four hours on his hands and knees in a wine cellar in the U.S.A., trying to sort out an array of 1912 ports for a client! A love of dust and spiders, as well as good joints, are clearly a prerequisite.
And what do the Brits think of New Zealand wines? Our sauvignon blancs and chardonnays are extremely popular. He also sees a great future for Kiwi pinots and was particularly impressed by our riesling. Encouraging words from on high!
SUMMER DINING AT THE BAY
Behind the scenes Now that summer has struck with a vengeance Pegasus Bay's restaurant is open for dining every day. Chef, Tim Knight, fresh from the Centra Hotel in Auckland, and sous chef, Michelle Lorier, have created a range of flavoursome, stylish dishes based on fresh seasonal local produce. They have designed them around our fine products so that every course has one or more recommended wines to accompany it. Don't, however, feel inhibited by our suggestions and if you come up with a better match please let us know. We look forward to seeing you.
PINOT! PINOT! PINOT!
A verdant ribbon snakes along a series of gently sloping hillsides. It is 50 kilometres long but its width varies enormously from 2-3 kilometres in some parts down to a mere 100 metres in others. Its vines lap around some of the most picturesque old villages in France and its red wine is the most expensive in the world. It is called Burgundy and the grape that has made it so famous is pinot noir.
Unlike Burgundy's white grape, chardonnay, which has been successfully transported to most of the world's vineyard regions, pinot noir is a reluctant traveller and gets homesick and sulks. It is not that it doesn't survive but it loses its sparkle and vitality, becoming flat and uninteresting.
Pinot noir at its best produces a wine of great complexity. Not only does it have a dazzling array of fruit flavours but it can also develop savoury or gamy nuances. Impressions of strawberries, blackberries, cherries and ripe plums may be intertwined with hints of grilled bacon, roast venison and rabbit pie. The wine may also have a marvellous textural quality so that it can be supple, smooth and velvety, while at the same time being enormously concentrated and rich. Most other reds with fruit concentration have big chewy tannins, making them seem drying and harsh beside pinot noir.
In most New World wine making areas pinot becomes dumb and depressed. It no longer sings its enchanting song but mouths the words in a flat disspirited way. The reason lies in climate and soil. The variety likes a distinctly cool climate and prefers rather mean, well-drained soil, especially with a little limestone. By sheer coincidence, several areas in New Zealand contain the magic combination needed to get pinot noir to "strut its stuff" in the most successful way.
Some varieties of grapes almost turn themselves into perfect wine by themselves. Not so with Pinot noir. It needs a lot of careful input by the grape grower and winemaker. Learning how to get the best out of pinot is a slow and painstaking business. Enter the Southern Pinot Noir Workshop. For well over a decade a group of dedicated viticulturalists and winemakers have regularly got together to cast a critical eye over each others efforts and share knowledge. They have realised that in order to make an impact it is no good just having one or two top performers; we need everybody to be doing their best. It has worked. Suddenly the international fine wine market has discovered Kiwi pinot noir and the demand has become tremendous. It will be increased even further by the New Zealand Pinot Noir Celebration, which is being held in Wellington on January 25 - 28, 2001. There are a large number of world famous wine personalities coming to share their secrets and to celebrate the pleasures of this amazing grape with consumers. Get more information at www.pinotnoir2001.co.nz. There will be an array of pinophilic nuts, including us, pouring our best. See you there!
FROM THE PRESCRIPTION PAD
Ever been embarrassed by a dog sniffing you rather too earnestly? Like many animals, they are very dependent on smell for a repertoire of their activities, some mentionable and others best left unsaid. By comparison, we humans, with our puny little noses, have come to rely much more on our eyes and ears. It doesn't mean that our snouts are no good, merely that we are too lazy to use them properly. Our sense of smell, or olfaction to be scientific, is actually extremely sensitive and we are capable of detecting the most minute amounts of certain volatile substances. Take the mouldy smell that contaminates a corked wine. This can spoil the aroma and flavour of wine when the offending chemical is present in only one or two parts per million. The mathematicians amongst you will have already worked out that this is equivalent to detecting something is abnormal about a second or two out of a century!
Not only is our olfaction incredibly sensitive but it is perhaps more powerful in evoking emotional memories than our other senses. Linda Buck of the Harvard Medical School in the USA, who is involved in experi-mental work on smell, reports that "there's something uncanny about the ability of an odour to elicit a memory that recreates the entire ambience of the experience". Similar opinions are held by others and Rachael Herz of the Monell Chemical Senses Centre in Philadelphia has recently shown that when visual, sound, touch and olfactory stimuli were randomly given and at the same time the subject was shown emotionally arousing pictures "odours were equivalent to other stimuli in their ability to elicit accurate recall but memories evoked by odours were always more emotional".
The ability of aromas to arouse emotions is used in subtle and often not so subtle ways in every-day life. Ask any perfume manufacturer. Smell is one of the most basic senses and is present in the most primitive of animals, who may not even have sight. If you trace the nerve endings from the olfactory region at the top of your nose they pass into an area known as the olfactory cortex at the base of the brain. This is associated with the limbic system of the brain which is especially involved in memory, emotion and motivation. Smell is the only sense which feeds directly into the important neuronal circuit.
I am sure you have noticed the way that wine nuts, like myself, always keep sniffing their wine and rambling on about its bouquet and taste. This is because wine, probably more than any other food, depends for its enjoyment on aroma and flavour. You generally don't find folks nosing their dinner in this way, and in polite society it is often regarded as bad form. The brain circuitry explains why wine can evoke such a rich spectrum of associations, conjure up such strong emotions and recall memories of the distant past. In the words of one vinophile "It was a night of enchantment. I can't remember the time or place and I now can't recall the woman, but the wine was Montrachet!"
Cheers, Ivan Donaldson
