It's all about balance and harmony

Esk Valley Estate vineyard manager Mike Saunders during last year's vintage pick of merlot from the terraces high above the winery. Photo / Warren Buckland

Esk Valley Estate

On a shelf in my den at home there is a bottle of wine which was once the toast of the town.

Oh yes, for that special occasion there was nothing like a bottle of bubbly back in the early 70s and dear old Glenvale Cold Duck fit the bill nicely ... sort of.

There it sits, foil-wrapped cork intact and a label bearing the words "a blend of sparkling grape wines", along with a badly painted picture of two ducks on a pond.

Arguably worth nothing, as it would by now taste like glycol and it's hardly Chateau-something, but for nostalgia it is priceless.

Glenvale has long since left the winemaking landscape but the site it occupied, up a long and winding road in the hills of Eskdale, remains and wine is still very much on the menu. However, today it is under the banner of (appropriately enough) Esk Valley.

It was two years after the great Hawke's Bay earthquake that an English chap by the name of Robert Bird built the Glenvale winery and cellars and set forth planting the fine soils with vines.

He also had constructed great concrete fermentation vats and he clearly made a good job of them for they are still in use for some varieties today.

Fortified wines were Mr Bird's main focus, although as times and demands changed Glenvale introduced more mainstream table wines ... and in there was the Cold Duck of course.

But Glenvale dissolved in the 1980s as the New Zealand wine market, over-supplied and wracked by cut-throat price wars, struggled.

However, one of the great wine names of the emerging new face of winemaking, George Fistonich, saw the potential and bought the site under the Villa Maria umbrella.

It remains there, but is run today completely independently, as Esk Valley.

Mr Fistonich sought the best people he could find to reignite the valleys of Esk with fine vines and wines.

Like chief winemaker Gordon Russell (often referred to as Mr Merlot) who worked at Villa Maria in Auckland as a cellar hand since 1987 and who arrived in the Bay to take on the assistant role in 1990, before assuming the mantle three years later.

While the terraced hillsides provide the fruit for the unique and acclaimed "The Terraces" premium wines, Esk Valley also sourced fruit from places such as the Gimblett Gravels region as well as Marlborough.

The results have clearly been well received ... the awards and gold medals, nationally and internationally, have poured in.

It is a unique and slightly romantic landscape there amidst the hillsides and terraces, and the winery runs to a doctrine of "hands-on" winemaking - the way it did 70 years ago.

Mr Russell said in terms of taste it was all about creating wines which reflected the site and and the gentle approach to picking and producing.

It is all about balance and harmony, and there is also plenty of the latter when you visit that remarkable spread.