The Merry Drinker

I don’t suppose any country, not even Great Britain, offers consumers as great a choice of wines as the United States. A mile from where I live, an emporium the size of an aircraft hangar sells more than 8000 labels from practically every wine-producing nation on earth.

As you would expect, its selection of US wines is rich beyond compare, and its range of South Americans, South Africans and Australasians is almost as wide. The choice of Italian wines is less spectacular, but still good. And the selection of Bordeaux is simply magnificent, everything from $16 bargains to $5000 eye-poppers.

So I feel rather churlish grumbling about this firm’s red Burgundies, but grumble I must. It is not just that the choice is comparatively meagre, but that the wines themselves are frequently poor. Too often this store has charged me $25, $35, even $50 for boring Pommards, indifferent Volnays, and Gevrey-Chambertins that bring about a deep existential gloom.

To be sure, the firm has some really serious Burgundy for those who can afford it: Romanée-Contis for $1000 upwards, that sort of thing.  But this is not the stuff of my everyday drinking or, I suspect, yours. So nowadays, when minded to drink a Pinot Noir, I tend to head for the non-French shelves and ignore the one marked “Burgundy”.  If nothing but a Burgundy will do, I will buy it from a more specialized outlet, where prices are higher but the choice and quality are more to my liking.

I say all this not out of resentment for my local supplier, but because I have noticed the same trend everywhere I have been in the United States. One can guess why.  For one thing, there is simply less Burgundy to go round: 200 million bottles each year, against Bordeaux’s 475 million.  And very many Burgundian winemakers have no scruples at all about selling an indifferent product.  Also, US drinkers seem generally less familiar with the Pinot Noir grape, and will accept a level of quality in a Nuits Saint-George that they would never tolerate in a St Emilion.

This means that we drinkers should do all in our power to encourage the efforts of non-French winemakers to create Burgundy substitutes.  The problem in the case of Pinot Noir is getting the taste right. Much as I enjoy American Pinots, especially those from Oregon, few could be considered replacements for Burgundy.  Most are too full-bodied, their fruit flavours too dominant, their use of wood too heavy-handed.  I have yet to find a single good example from South America, and every Australian version I have tried has been a disappointment.

The greatest hope lies with New Zealand.  It is not simply that the country’s cool, damp climate favours the Pinot Noir grape, but also that the country’s winemakers seem obsessed with replicating the Burgundy style.  I think they are succeeding. Their Pinot Noirs are now light enough, complex enough, and gamey enough to be mistakable for the original.

In fact, the only reason you would know that some of these Pinot Noirs were from New Zealand is because no Burgundian would charge so little for anything this good. This week’s wine costs only $22 (£15), yet it is easily better than one or two $50 Burgundies I have suffered lately. It has a bright, clean nose suggesting freshly sanded wood. Its flavours suggest prunes, berries and cigar boxes, with a pleasing cedary aftertaste.

This wine also has the distinction of having been made by an exclusively Maori firm – the first and only such winery in New Zealand, we are told. Tohu has been in business for a mere 11 years, yet it is already ranked among the country’s top 30 winemakers. It is striving to join the top 10. When it succeeds, its price will no doubt soar, and we shall have to seek our Burgundy alternatives elsewhere. But for the time being, Tohu is one of the best value Pinot Noirs of its kind.