White haven Pinot Gris is a versatile dry style with flavours of fresh nashi pears and crisp red apples, a medium body and textural finish. It's a great wine for everyday drinking with or without food, a lovely aperitif style to enjoy at lunch and early evening.

Whitehaven Wines began life in 1994 as a romantic business for a couple of corporate escapees, Sue and Greg White, who had given up life in the rat race of Auckland for another kind of life aboard their yacht. When sailing around the country, they took shelter in the Marlborough Sounds from Pacific storms and fell in love with the region. An easy thing to do when harbouring in the spectacularly pristine waters of the Sounds. They decided to settle there on terra firma once more and try their hands at wine production, hiring a winemaker and beginning a business which has now been around for 26 years. Greg has sadly passed away now, leaving a legacy as well as his wife and daughter, Sam, to run the winery.

Their winemaker is Peter Jackson.

Crater Rim Riesling is medium sweet in style but so beautifully balanced by fresh  acidity that it tastes medium dry with great concentration of tropical fruit flavours and a succulent, long finish. It's made with grapes grown on Glasnevin Gravels, one of North Canterbury's golden miles of vineyards.

Winemaker Haydon Good worked for Clemens Busch in the Mosel, from which he says one of his take home pieces of information for making Riesling was to make picking decision on acidity then balance the wine with residual sugar, depending on the season and the acidity. That philosophy comes through bright, fresh and clear in this stunningly good value Riesling. 

This stunning South Island Sauvignon Semillon blend is a maverick New Zealand take on the classic white Bordeaux blend, offering fresh, bright and delicious aromas of ripe apple, lime, gooseberry and passionfruit. The Sauvignon (70%) brings fruit flavours and excellent acidity while the Semillon (30%) brings fruit weight, richness and age ability, due to its pronounced acidity. 

Both varieties were aged on their natural deposits of yeast lees for approximately 10 months, prior to blending. This lees contact brings creaminess and body. Once bottled, the wine was left to age for another year before release, allowing the varietal characters to integrate further.

This wine drinks deliciously well now, preferably served in a large glass, but it has a long history of great age ability too and is a good wine for the cellar.

Greystone is one of North Canterbury's wine stars situated on the slopes of limestone rich hills in Omihi. All of the grapes that go into Greystone wines are 100% certified organic with BioGro NZ and all are estate grown. No additional fruit is purchased to supplement production, which is one of many incremental steps that go into Greystone's high quality wines. 

This Sauvignon Blanc was 100% barrel fermented in old oak with wild yeasts and is made from fully certified organic grapes with BioGro NZ certification. Like all Greystone wines, it is made entirely from estate grown fruit with nothing bought in to supplement production. This is one of many incremental steps at Greystone that consistently ensures high quality. Partial malolactic fermentation provides creamy flavour notes to this wine, which are kept in check with the balance of bright acidity and a light spicy taste which further adds complexity.

Certified organic with BioGro NZ.

About Greystone

The Greystone wine story began in 2000 when the Thomas Family bought an old sheep farm on the Omihi hills in the Waipara Valley, North Canterbury. The rolling limestone hills lured this family in and their goal was a single minded one: to make great wines from the limestone rich soils here. Fast forward 20 years and Greystone is one of the great (and, some might say, yet to be fully discovered) wineries in this outstanding wine region. Not least due to the work of winemaker Dom Maxwell and general manager Nick Gill, who began working together in 2005 and has grown along with the brand and quality.

This wine is made exclusively with hand harvested fruit from the 18 year old vines on the Blackenbrook Home block where the vines grow on Moutere clay soil covered by a layer of sandy loam. The wine making is extremely gentle with whole bunch pressing, cool fermentation, minimal pumping over, extended lees contact and using gravity to move the wine when required.

8% of the wine is aged in oak to add mouthfeel and complexity and there is no fining pre-bottling.

 At 5.7g/l of residual sugar this is dry in style.

Tasting Notes
Our Blackenbrook Pinot Gris 2019 displays delightful pear, quince and spice notes framed by a silky texture, a splash of sweetness and gentle acidity. Ideal serving temperature 15 degrees.

Silver - New Zealand Wine of the Year Awards

4 1/2 Stars Michael Cooper

This powerful wine is still very youthful. It has strong peach, pear, lychee and spice flavours with a distinct touch of complexity, slight sweetness balanced by fresh acidity and a scented bouquet.

Palliser Pinot Gris has gentle soft qualities and is off dry in taste with flavours of candied ginger and mandarin peel leading to a light bodied wine with a spicy finish.

The grapes in this wine are a combination of three vineyards; Pencarrow Vineyard 60%, the organic Om Santi Vineyard 28% and the balance from the Clouston Vineyard. A portion was fermented in old French oak barrels to provide complexity. The two portions were  blended and aged for a a further two months on lees to gain texture before bottling. 

100% hand-picked Chardonnay, crushed and pressed into old Burgundian French oak barrels for wild yeast fermentation until dry. The wine was matured in barrel for 14-16 months during which time it underwent full malolactic fermentation.

This is a complex Chardonnay with multiple layers of ripe fruit and richness, along with a chalky minerality on the nose. The palate combines fruit weight and balanced acidity with a tight yet generous structure. This is followed by a long lingering pithy citrus finish with and hints of savouriness.

Classy fruit-forward Pinot grown on Upper Moutere clay. The elegant nose offers wild red fruits and brambles that lead to a seductive, feminine palate layered with fine tannins and lifting acidity. 

Sensational certified organic Marlborough Pinot Noir with dark fruit flavours, elegant structure and a spicy style. All grapes in this wine were hand picked and 20% were whole bunch fermented in large French oak with no crushing. Light extraction is the aim, says winemaker Damien Yvon, who gave the wine less than three weeks of total post ferment maceration time. The finished wine was then aged for 12 months in French oak, 20% of which was new – a relatively modest amount, which allows the fruit to be hero in this wine. It is a beautifully refined, silky and elegant Pinot Noir.

Clos Henri began 22 years ago in Marlborough when the French Bourgeois family expanded their winemaking from the heart of Sancerre in the tiny village of Chavignol to Blenheim, in 2001. Now that their vines are 22 years of age , the family feels that they are only now starting to reflect and express the taste of the land. This family retains their land and winemaking in Chavignol where they have made wine for 11 generations.

Impressively juicy Cabernet Franc from Hawke's Bay winemaker Jenny Dobson, who has extensive experience making wine from this great grape in Bordeaux, France. She applies her knowledge and winemaking skills of wild yeast, whole bunches in the ferment and foot plunging (her own feet) to coax the best from this full bodied, deep purple Cabernet Franc.

It's named after her aunt Francie and made as a tribute to her. 

Dobson describes this wine has tasting of red roses, spicy raspberries and scented velvet. 

Seresin Estate's Zosia Rose is a superbly flavoursome rose that has rich dark fruity flavours, thanks to being made from the Abel clone of Pinot Noir (the king of Pinot grapes) grown on a north facing plot in the Raupo Vineyard in Marlborough.

 Savoury depth adds complexity to this medium bodied rose, which tastes more like a pale red wine more than a youthful pink one. Wild yeast fermentation in old French oak with partial malolactic fermentation adds softness to the wine.

Organic certification

The organic story at Seresin

One of the greatest things about Seresin Estate is the organic certification. This came relatively early on for Seresin, who was dismayed by the amount used and the impacts of man made chemicals, which were routinely and frequently sprayed on vines. His early adopting philosophy of organic certification paved a positive path for the integrity of the wines as well as leading others to follow suit.

This bone dry, savoury and delicious Marlborough rose is clearly next level in price but then, so too is the taste of this wine. Simon Waghorn, the winemaker, gave the hand picked grapes a warm fast ferment to provide this single vineyard rose with its dry, savoury flavours, moving the taste firmly away from a tutti fruity style into refreshingly different one. Flavours here are all about slivered almonds, dried cranberries and even an earthy note on its lingering, weighty finish.

It gains depth of flavour and body from being fermented on solids (yeast lees) and was fermented to total dryness, leaving the wine with no residual sugar. 

Comelybank Vineyard Rose is a single vineyard wine made with grapes grown by Jeff and Vanessa Hammond in the Waihopai Valley.

It is 85% Pinot Noir and 15% Pinot Gris.

The story of Astrolabe

Diversity, history and family ownership are among the reasons to try the outstanding range of wines from Astrolabe, which was founded in 1996 in Marlborough by winemaker Simon Waghorn and his partner in life and wine, Jane. 

Simon has forged a reputation for being one of New Zealand's most respected producers of aromatic white wines after winning an almost embarrassingly long string of awards for his Sauvignon Blancs. He has also forged a name for adventurously diverse winemaking - he produces dry flinty whites from the most southern vineyard in Marlborough at Kekerengu on the coast about an hour's drive south of Blenheim. He is the only winemaker to produce wines from here. 

He is also one of the few in this country to make Albarino, Chenin Blanc and a consistently outstanding range of wines from the organically certified hillside sloping site that is the Wrekin Vineyard in Marlborough. 

The winery remains family owned and is now run by two generations, including Simon and Jane as well as their adult daughters. 

A small volume, high quality new Chardonnay from Marlborough, which is gaining huge traction with critics, both nationally and globally. 

What the critics say

BOB CAMPBELL MW

“Novum deserves to be on every wine lovers radar” 

JANCIS ROBINSON MW, UK

“Very smart nose fully vindicates my enthusiasm for NZ Chardonnay.

If only all white burgundy smelt this clean and compelling. Crystalline fruit. Good, medium weight of pure fruit that’s already intense but promises much more in the future. Long and complex. No playing around with reduction. A beautiful wine.”

95 Points, Cameron Douglas MS, NZ

"An intriguing almost sensual bouquet of Chardonnay. Aromas of red apple and sweet peach tea, lees spices and white flowers, flint and chalk-like minerality, and a light dusting of fragrant baking spices. Very sophisticated and quite pure on the palate - dry, complex, even and lengthy. A precise palate weight with a youthful acid line, extremely fine wood tannins and fine lees texture. Flavours of white and yellow orchard fruits, wood spices and fine stone-like minerality. A delicious example, modern, youthful, complex and intriguing. Lots to like. Drink now and through 2026." 

Bold, spicy and beautiful Pinot Noir from the deep south made by Matt Connell and Dom and Ally Mondillo, who founded Mondillo Wines. The couple were the first people to plant grapes in Bendigo, one of the most arid, dry sub regions in Central Otago, the world's southernmost wine region. Bendigo is often the first area in the wider region to harvest grapes each year and Dom Mondillo typically ensures that his grapes are 100% destemmed before fermentation. 

This wine was aged for 10 months in French oak, 25% new, which flatters its elegant red fruit flavours, providing silky flavours and textures. This wine drinks well now and will benefit from bottle age of at least four to five years.  

Central Otago makes famously dry, concentrated styles of Pinot Gris and Te Kano Life Pinot Gris is an excellent example. Flavours of peach and pear flesh out the body with ginger and spicy aromas adding depth. 

The grapes were hand harvested from the Jerome vineyard which has naturally low vigour and sandy soils, which produce smaller than usual grapes with intense flavours, which produce this structured and complex Gris.