Twilght at Pegasus Bay - Photo by Michael Hooper

MAKING WINE OUTSIDE

In the world of wine there is an adage which says that wine is made in the vineyard. We very much believe this. It doesn't mean we are going to shift our presses, fermentation vats, tanks and barrels out under the stars amongst the vines, but that the fruit determines the ultimate quality of the wine. Sure, you can mess it up in the winery and make a sow's ear out of a silk purse, but you can't do it the other way around.

There are some things in the vineyard which can be mechanised without causing compromise, such as mowing the grass, avoiding shading by trimming the vines of excess summer foliage and the like. There is other work which you can do by machine, including pruning, which will reduce eventual quality and there are a lot of manual tasks which many vineyards ignore because they are simply too difficult or labour intensive. The last mentioned include straightening vine shoots in the trellis to get maximum exposure to sunlight, thinning the crop and removing any fruit which is lagging behind in ripeness. Although we are not a big vineyard we have a disproportionately large vineyard staff. The reason is because we not only believe in adages but we are lazy and if we get it right in the vineyard we don't have to do so much work in the winery. Wines vinted from ideal fruit make themselves, more or less, so that you don't have to force them to fit an unsuitable mould by trying to adjust this and that.

We would like to take our hats off to our vineyard team, ably lead by our viticulturist/vineyard manager, Greg Miller and say thank you very much for all your hard work.

You Make Our Wine: Greg Miller, Wayne Gardener, Lee-Ann Cameron, Robin Needham, Sam Wykes

GO DOWN MARKET WITH PEGASUS

A while back we were approached by a group from the Waipara area which was looking for a new home for a very successful Farmers Market. As we are keen on natural, local produce we immediately agreed to help out and offered the grassy amphitheatre, which is below and beside our restaurant and winery. Any Saturday morning that you are in our area and want to go to market you will be most welcome to join the throngs down in our amphitheatre. It is all go each Saturday morning between 9am-12pm.

A MUSEUM FOR AMUSING

Museums have a reputation for being dry, dusty places. We have just opened one which may be dusty but it is certainly not dry! It is a museum cellar for bottles of past vintages of wine.

Marketing people will tell you that over 95% of wine is consumed within hours of being purchased. In spite of such daunting statistics we make our wines so they can be cellared. Fruit bomb wines can be attractive when they are young and there's nothing the matter with that. If you drink them frequently, however, they can become rather boring and when you get behind the mask of fruit they are often quite simple, lacking the interesting and savoury nuances which develop as a wine ages. When they have time in the bottle these powder puff wines tend to collapse because they don't have adequate structure and are all puff and wind.

As we like the multi-layered complexity which develops with time we try to create wines so they will cellar well. If you do this your wines may not be so appealing when they are young and we thus try to hold them back until we feel they are at least ready to drink, even although they will undoubtedly improve with further time in the bottle. That's why we tend to release our wine later than many other wineries. But even wines made to cellar have a definite life span and eventually reach a peak in quality before gradually going down hill. Theory is all very well but how can you know your wines will cellar well and when they will be drinking at their best? We can't, unless we age bottles ourselves and try them from time to time. Hence our museum cellar. It's in the wine glass that the truth comes out.

Since we have been making wine we have put bottles of each vintage aside to see how they age, but they have been stored in a higgledy-piggledy fashion all over the winery so that is has often been difficult, or impossible, to get a specific wine when we want it, let alone do any sort of systematic review. Now we have it all laid out in order and easily accessible. In addition, as the cellar is dug into a bank, the temperature is ideal. Anytime we want to amuse ourselves on a rainy afternoon we can just go to the museum. We can also give you well cellared older vintages when you come to the Pegasus Bay restaurant. We hope you enjoy them.

THE VIRGIN PEGASUS

It's great when someone throws you a bouquet, rather than a brickbat, especially when it is totally unexpected. It happened to us recently when our Pegasus Bay was written up amongst a small coterie of top Australasian restaurants in the Virgin Blue Magazine. Here is what it said, "Some diners come here for the chandeliers formed by a mass of wine bottles suspended from an extravagantly high ceiling. Others come for the stunning views of rambling green lawns and gardens or just to sample the legendary wine that's produced on-site. While people come here for all of the above they mainly come for the magnificent food. The fact that every meal is created with a matching wine in mind and that the menu features fresh produce grown in near-by gardens makes for a very special menu. Let the children run around on the grass while you decide between the freshest fare on the seasonal menu."

Need we say more. Come for lunch any day, but it is best to book for weekends by telephoning 03 3146869 ext 1. Alternatively just pop into the cellar door sales tasting room. We would be delighted to see you.

PEGASUS BAY MERLOT/CABERNET TAKES OFF

We have just learnt that Pegasus Bay Merlot Cabernet has taken off and moved to another level higher than Mount Everest in fact. Air New Zealand have purchased our 2003 Merlot Cabernet to serve to travellers on First and Business Class. It thus becomes one of an exclusive group of New Zealand Claret-style wines to receive such elevated status in a world that tends to have been dominated by big mouth-numbing Ozzie reds and the like. We are proud to have been chosen to supply finesse as well as power.

FROM THE PRESCRIPTION PAD

I was saddened to hear that Len Evans, a giant of the Australian wine industry, had drained the last drop from his bottle. At 75 years he had passed his 3 score and 10, but his death was sudden and unexpected. As a wine writer, wine judge and co-founder of a prestigious winery, he appeared as dinkum as they come, but was really adopted by and adopted Oz when he emigrated from Wales as a young man.

When I heard about Len's demise, I was reminded of the worst imaginable horror movie. I saw it on TV while visiting the red continent about 25 years ago. It still makes me shudder to think of it and, worst of all, it was real life TV footage. The drama was set in Iran, Teheran to be precise. The Shah had just shuffled off to exile in Egypt and the Ayatollah had arrived from Paris. A mob of zealots had stormed one of Teheran's top international hotels and, grinning from one collective ear to another, they were hurling bottles against a brick wall while soldiers had lined others up, bottles that is, and were shooting at them. It took a zoom shot, however, to reveal the complete wretchedness of the situation - these were amongst the highest quality and most expensive wines in the world! I needed psychotherapy on a regular basis over the next year!

Well, Len Evans had a theorem about people who smash bottles of good wine. As you are reading this newsletter, I know you are not one of them. However, you might be interested to know what happens on the dark side. I can't quote Len's Theory of Capacity exactly, but it was undoubtedly arrived at after decades of painstaking research and deep intellectual reasoning, enlightened and inspired by a co-researcher named Bacchus. It is said in scholarly circles to have the importance of Einstein's theory of relativity but greater practical application and has potential to affect anyone.

Len worked out that there is an awful lot of wine in the world, but there is also a lot of awful wine. There is a huge range of grape varieties, wine styles, wine regions, producers and the like. Nobody can drink them all so everyone should be selective. He suggested you should start by working out how much you can imbibe, making certain you do not drink to excess. Let's say you can stow X bottles a week. Multiply by 52 and then by the number of years of life expectancy you might have left. You could be surprised at how small the total figure is. For an old codger like me I can probably do it on my fingers and toes, but you bright, young sparks will no doubt have to use a complicated computer programme. At any rate, according to Len, there is no point in having a bigger wine cellar than that magic number unless you have a lot of good mates who would be prepared to help you out after the funeral.

It's brilliant isn't it? But the real genius is that Len attached a corollary to the Theory of Capacity which, I guess, could be called The Theory of Quality. He worked out that anyone who suggests that you can't drink good wine all the time is talking a load of nonsense. In fact, he pointed out that it is obligatory to drink good wine all of the time. Otherwise, because of your limited capacity, drinking a bottle of inferior wine is equivalent to smashing a superior one against a wall, the immense potential pleasure derived from the top bottle being irretrievably lost.

Now, it seems to me that Len's work has gone beyond theory and is now established fact. It also has much wider application than at just a personal level. The world wine market, although large, has a definite limit on its capacity for consumption. Due to over-production, largely by big international companies, supply exceeds demand, especially at the bottom end of the market, which is awash with cheap, wishy washy, soulless muck. The wine drinking public, which includes you and me, have largely woken up to this so these big boys have taken a new tack. Have you noticed how many of their old familiar brands have disappeared from wine shelves or are now reserved for the dregs. In their place they have created a range of new, sexy looking brands or bought existing respected ones, filling them with their inferior products. The big company's name appears nowhere on the bottle and the web site mentioned on the back label carries no hint of it, the whole product being made to look like that of a small quality conscious producer. Not all of these bottles are disappointing, but they contain more than their share of the unexciting and anaemic. The secret to this dilemma is to know who are the actual people behind any particular brand and if you don't know, it can usually be found out by asking the retailer. Should your favourite brand change hands it is a good idea to watch the quality doesn't drift south. At the end of the day it is the quality of the wine in the bottle that you are buying that is important. Statistics say that wine loving people are drinking less but better quality. Just remember, for every bottle of rubbish you buy there is a bottle of good wine which doesn't get sold and this is equivalent to smashing it. The thought makes me weak at the knees so I will sit down and revive myself with a glass of quality wine that has been made with passion.

Cheers, Ivan Donaldson