The Southern Edge

Central Otago in New Zealand is the southernmost wine region in the world.

It is a continental pocket in the interior of the South Island: schist and old glacial gravels, very dry air, hot days and genuinely cold nights. Nothing about it resembles Burgundy. There is no limestone, no maritime influence, no comparable history, and the light is different.

Pinot noir grows there extremely well.

The mechanism is the diurnal swing, and it is worth understanding because it explains a lot of new world wine. Heat during the day ripens the fruit. Cold at night slows the vine's respiration, which is the process that burns off acidity as the grapes ripen. So you can reach a level of ripeness that would flatten a wine in a uniformly warm climate and still keep the acid that gives it shape.

Martinborough further north does a version of it. So does Tasmania, and the Sonoma Coast, and Mornington Peninsula. The list is longer every decade, and the pattern is the same each time: somebody found a cold edge, planted pinot noir on it, and made something good.

Now the part that matters.

Nobody who has tasted Central Otago and Chambolle-Musigny side by side has ever confused them.

Both are unmistakably pinot noir. Neither is mistakable for the other. The Otago wine is riper, more overtly fruited, darker in its register, more consistent from year to year. The Chambolle is lighter, more savoury, more variable, and in the years it works it does something the Otago wine does not attempt.

This is awkward for everybody.

If you believe the grape is the wine and terroir is mostly a story, you have to explain why these two are so reliably distinguishable. If you believe great pinot noir requires Burgundian conditions, you have to explain why schist at the bottom of the world produces wine this good.

The most interesting development in these regions over the last twenty years is that the best producers stopped trying to answer the question.

For a long time the marketing was comparative. The Burgundy of the southern hemisphere, and similar. It sold some wine and it conceded the whole argument, because a wine described as the Burgundy of somewhere has agreed to be judged as a second-rate version of something else, and it can only ever lose that comparison.

The producers now selling at serious prices are the ones who gave it up. They are making Central Otago pinot noir and asking to be assessed on that basis, which is both more honest and, it turns out, considerably better business.

What Burgundy still has that these regions do not is the bad year.

Otago ripens reliably. That produces consistency, which is a genuine commercial virtue and a slight aesthetic loss, because the vintages do not have much to say to each other. Burgundy's marginality produces failures, and it produces the years people are still arguing about four decades later.

Whether that trade is worth making depends entirely on what you think you are buying when you buy a bottle of this grape.