The vine life

Wine tasting pinot noir at Cloudy Bay vineyard in Marlborough. Photo / Supplied

In Malborough, the vineyards grow to the very edge of the airport. Stretching across the flats of the Wairau Valley, the vines spread between the walls of the surrounding hills like so many irregular swatches of black-brown tweed. It's winter, so there's nothing doing, no fruit, no leaves. In many hundreds of orderly rows, the vines hang like the bones of old men slung from trellises, each skeleton's slender fingers reaching out toward its neighbours.

Marlborough is, famously, the country's largest wine-producing region, and the Wairau, possibly equally famously, is the largest growing area in Marlborough. And it was here that I'd come to get an education on what is to take wine very seriously indeed.

Sweeping in from Auckland for two days in wine country, I pressed my nose to a window of the Air New Zealand Dash 8 but could see little of the sleeping vines hemmed by the verdant Richmond Ranges to the north, the bald, brown Wither Hills to the south, and, towards the east, the Cook Strait's edge. It was only during a 20-minute chopper flight towards dusk that same day that I began to appreciate that this growing region — which, as much as any, has helped the New Zealand wine industry into the consciousness of the world's drinkers — is not much longer than 20km and, at its narrowest point, little more than 5km wide. This valley's reputation is huge but in reality it is rather small, almost intimate.

Its plain was shaped by a series of glaciers, the last just 14,000 years ago, as well as the movement of the Wairau River. This has left rich, alluvial flats which luxuriate in more sunshine hours each year than anywhere else in New Zealand. From the air you can see old river stones sitting right near the surface of the plain, just below the vines. Here and there you can detect what was once an old river bed too.

This small valley is, at the very least, the spiritual home of New Zealand's most successful wine. Sauvignon blanc grapes predominate in the Wairau and its neighbour, the Awatere valley; they account for some 65 per cent of the region's wine production, according to Wine Marlborough. And, of course, the Wairau is the home of Cloudy Bay, the producer of perhaps the most internationally famous New Zealand sauvignon. But I'm not here to drink sav, no matter how good it might be. My two days in wine country — between helicopter rides and flash lunches and dinner — are about another grape altogether, the apparently mysterious pinot noir.

"It's A minx," says Ian Morden. The Cloudy Bay's estate director, a South African by way of Australia, looks at me like this should mean something. He'd already told an audience of 150-plus, gathered to eat and drink at the vineyard, the very same thing. The minx in question is, of course, the pinot noir grape.

In wine country, idiosyncratic descriptions are de rigueur. Wines are, variously, described as oaky, citrusy, having vanilla notes or berry overtones, or tasting like chocolate, cherries or even of straw or a stony river. Indeed formal wine "notes" — the short brag about the aroma and taste of an individual wine — usually claim such a wildly disparate range of flavours that you wonder if the author is pulling your leg. There are, I'm sure, many more descriptors than those above, though it is a singular oddity that for serious connoisseurs wine apparently never tastes of its single constituent, grapes.

But I digress.

The pinot noir grape is apparently a minx, and one that Cloudy Bay has been taming for a couple of decades. The company — which was established in 1985 by Australian winemakers Cape Mentelle and is now owned by French company Moet Hennessy — first made pinot in 1989 before setting up something it called "Project Pinot" in the early 1990s. Clones of vines from Burgundy — for it is the pinot noir grape which makes that region's famous wine — were imported and planted. Some 15 years on, the vineyard's pinot is very well thought of by serious wine types. Indeed June's issue of international wine magazine Decanter named it among the best 50 new world pinots, giving it four stars and describing the 2007 vintage as "phenomenal".

For 10 years now, the vineyard has trumpeted its version of the famous wine by holding something it calls "Pinot at Cloudy Bay", which is essentially a formal tasting day with a nice, long lunch for afters. This year, the 10th anniversary, promised 18 pinots from four countries — New Zealand, Australia, the United States and (terrible excitement) France. How could one say no?

However, to the outsider — or at least to this outsider — the cult of pinot can be rather mystifying itself. Evidently it is one of the oldest grape varieties and, according to New Zealand wine writer John Saker, a guest of honour and speaker at the tasting and lunch, pinot as we know it owes a debt to a bunch of crazy French monks called the Cistercians, who first worked out that every pinot vineyard produced something different.

According to something I'd read by well-known wine writer Michael Cooper, pinot noir is more than capable of making great wine, but not good cheap reds. A thin-skinned grape, it has fewer colouring pigments and flavouring substances than all of the other classic red wine varieties. According to Cooper, it's especially vulnerable to over-cropping, which causes a marked loss of colour and flavour. It's fussy about where it's cultivated too. "In perfect growing conditions it can give perfumed, rich and velvety reds," Cooper wrote, "but in too-cool regions and vintages its wine is often thin and weedy. In a too-warm environment, the wine is nondescript."

And once in the glass, so I'm told, pinot is apparently more prone than other wines to change itself again. The first, second and third sampling from your glass may be completely different experiences.

What a minx it is, then, the famed pinot noir grape. Capricious too. No wonder I found myself so utterly out of my depth.

In the barrel room next to Cloudy Bay's Cellar Door, three very long, narrow, waist-high tables sat between the rows of French oak barrels. Each table was covered with scores of glasses set out in orderly lines to receive the blessed pinot. Near each setting were smaller tumblers of water and containers of bread sticks (to cleanse the palate, you understand).

There was not one single chair. Evidently pinot must be appreciated standing up. But you'd think the ticket price might have rated the use of a stool; many of the 150-plus pinot-philes who'd turned up had paid $350 a piece for this tasting, and the lunch, "created" by Wellington chef Martin Bosley, that would follow.

The pinot punters were of a type, almost exclusively Pakeha, their average age in the 50s. The women dripped expensive handbags and jewellery, the men pushed around well-fed bellies.

As we trooped in from the cellar door searching for our places (we were each allotted a table number) the crowd seemed quite jolly. Possibly this was at the prospect of drinking at 11 on a Saturday morning.

In just over an hour we embarked on the three "flights" of six wines in a blind tasting, totalling 18 wines. Blind tasting doesn't involve blindfolds, but it does involve guessing, an odd sense of competition, and a lot else besides. We were ordered into complete silence (we would have our chance to talk about the wine in the short intervals between the flights) so that we could apply full concentration to the task at hand.

A formal wine tasting is, depending on your threshold for the ludicrous, either mildly comic or totally silly.

It is also most curious. It is conducted with the seriousness of religious rite. And it involves a (possibly carefully rehearsed) series of manoeuvres. By watching my fellow drinkers I was able to deduce the form: Furrow brow, pick up wine glass, swirl wine, peer at wine, furrow brow, swirl wine, sniff at wine, furrow brow, take sizeable sip, slosh wine around mouth, furrow brow, make sort-of sucking noise like Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter, furrow brow.

It was at this point — before beginning this dotty ritual again with a new glass — that I swallowed. In this, I was almost alone. Almost everyone else chose to eject the wine from their mouths into sawdust-lined buckets like it was cheap, corked chianti.

In the silent but echoey barrel room this sounded, for all the world, like people barfing.

Having completed the rite, the drinker moved to his tasting notes booklet, supplied, along with a pencil, by Cloudy Bay. Here was where those previously mentioned descriptors come in handy. Yet I had no idea what I should write because I had no idea what I was tasting. So I was forced to make things up; for wine six I wrote "strange nose, nice ears, long legs". It was, however, remarkable how each glass of essentially the same wine tasted and smelled quite different from the next.

Was that the point? I boxed on, but discovered little. After 18 (small) samples of expensive pinot I retired, in a semi-relaxed fashion, to the courtyard in front of the cellar doors for canapes and a cleansing glass of something I was able to get my head around, Cloudy Bay's bubbly, Pelorus. The mysterious minx had defeated me.

In Malborough, the vineyards surround you. The wine culture, however, is all consuming. Over Martin Bosley's lunch, the talk involved plonk in general (due to the Moet Hennessy connection) and pinot in particular. Call it a gross personality disorder — or a whine — but I'd rather drink wine than talk about it. Still, when seated next to one of Cloudy Bay's winemakers, Tim Heath, who is a thoroughly nice bloke, I couldn't help but marvel at the passion pinot can muster. Indeed, so impassioned was he, that he went so far as to describe one of the pinots we'd just bolted as "evil" (decorum prevents me from saying which one). I couldn't quite work out why exactly it was evil, though it was, you'd have to say, a pretty frank analysis.

As I sat through lunch I couldn't help the creeping feeling that wine tasting might be something like a confidence trick. Each person here has an investment in pinot noir being a minx, a curiosity, a mystery — when you're taking it as seriously as this, you must.

This wasn't Heath's fault, nor any of the other sterling folk at Cloudy. These people are fervent about their business. But that is it, I thought later: it is just a business. And despite the "story" of a vineyard, a wine's vanilla notes or berry overtones or the peculiarities of soil and climate and so on, it is, in the end, a business that's ultimately about selling expensive alcohol to well-heeled drinkers at the best price you can get.

It may be that the well-heeled drinkers who'd paid $350 a piece to be there reached some higher spiritual plain as they worked their way through those pricey pinots (one goes for $385 a bottle). Or it could be the case, if one was a tad cynical, that they're buying the chance to exhibit their "good taste" and "sophistication" in the company of others who are equally impressed by such things.

To someone like me — yes I admit it, a philistine — who never moves much beyond the sentiment that some wines (like people and cars and meals) are nicer than others, the rituals of the formal wine tasting seem like, to be frank in my own turn, ostentation.

But in Marlborough, where the vineyards dominate the landscape like an endless sea of money trees, it's probably best to keep such thoughts to yourself. Better to raise your glass and toast yet another fine vintage of the minx.