From Sheep Paddock to Internationally Feted Winery: 30 Years of Cloudy Bay

“The thing is, after a round of trying 40 or so Sauvignon Blancs, you really need to wash it all down with a good, hearty steak pie.” I’m sitting at a beautiful picnic banquet table in the middle of a vineyard eating freshly made pizzas and enjoying a glass of Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc, while a winemaker tells me the struggles of being surrounded by that much wine and having to taste it all. I nod empathetically and take a sip of wine, enjoying the picturesque Marlborough setting (the site earning its adjective in full with nearly every Instagram account present posting a picture of it).

Only two or so weeks earlier, I had received an email from the good folk at Cloudy Bay asking whether I would like to come visit their winery and be treated to a cruise, a helicopter ride and copious amounts of wine in celebration of the winery and their signature Sauvignon Blanc’s 30th anniversary on the 1st of October. I said I would.

Thus I found myself sitting in seat 14D on an 17 x 4-seater Aerospatiale ATR72 model bound for Blenheim, putting on my out-of-office and taking a weekend, starting on a Wednesday. The plane was positively heaving with Auckland media.

No sooner had we landed than we were handed our first glass of Pelorus, Cloudy Bay’s own sparkling wine. Due to the job description and the overwhelming hospitality of the Cloudy Bay crew, for the next two days my hand is never far from the company of a glass of one of Cloudy Bay’s wines. I recognise the futility of keeping count of my sips, but with the help of the series of generous degustations, I thankfully remain grounded.

Our first stop is the The Shack, a phoenix-from-the-ashes type of story which, in a sense, embodies Cloudy Bay winery. In 2008, the winery’s well-loved retreat was burnt down by a fire started presumably by a particular French man who was staying there and left a cigarette unattended. That same year was the new Estate Director Ian Morden’s first year on the job. “I remember standing there and thinking this is not a good omen”, Ian tells us in the newly rebuilt eco-friendly retreat. It also turned out to be the first year that Cloudy Bay shifted its entire business model to a low-risk quality-based strategy, “we sacrifice numbers for quality”. Just a few years later, in 2012, The Shack was beautifully rebuilt, with a French-designed hanging fire place – for a touch of irony.

“To understand a wine you need to understand where it’s coming from.” Tim Heath, the Senior Winemaker tells me while everyone’s mingling. “But in the end, we’re just some ordinary guys making some wine we hope you’ll say ‘that’s delicious’ about.” He takes a sip from his glass and looks up at me with pure conviction. “Wine is about enjoyment”. Tim’s relationship with Cloudy Bay spans years back. He tells me that while growing up in Melbourne, his family used to have Cloudy Bay in the family store to pull out during special occasions. He later quite serendipitously ended up at Cloudy Bay, after deciding that being a winemaker “looked like too much fun to be considered a real job.” As we talk, a round of the 2015 vintage of the Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc, which retails at $36.99 per bottle, is dished out.

Now, here’s the point where I should probably disclose my pre-existing feelings towards Sauvignon Blanc, and perhaps all white wine really: tentative. I don’t usually trust white wine. I can’t exactly say where my initial aversion towards it began – whether it was an ill-fated and never repeated encounter with a very punchy boxed white wine in my student years, or some other occasion that evades my memory. However, with the lure of an amazing-sounding trip, I suspended my previously held beliefs.

I look down at my glass and take a sip of the Sav in my hand; and I like it. It’s a lot politer than the white wines I’m used to.

While in a helicopter overlooking the vineyards of Blenheim with Matt Duggan, an ex-Wellingtonian and one of the younger viticulturists of Cloudy Bay, I confess what my feelings about white wine have been. He’s not surprised, saying that most Savs, when grown purely for a profit yield instead of a quality yield, have that very green, punchy characteristic and end up putting a lot of people off. They’re also the ones that don’t have a lot of longevity in terms of flavour.

In general, Marlborough is known as a fantastic region for growing Sauvignon Blanc wines, producing a distinct Sav which is recognisable worldwide. However, Matt explains that even in the region itself there’s a difference in grape quality depending on where the grape’s grown. He points out the different parts of Wairau Valley from above in the air. “Wine from the lower Wairau Valley is usually a showstopper wine when it comes out, but then it matures into cabbage.” This is mostly due to the extra build-up of methoxypyrazine found in the soil at the lower part of the Wairau River, a chemical compound which gives the wine a “tinned green asparagus” quality over time.

80% of Cloudy Bay’s Sav Blanc mix comes from the mid-Wairau Valley, in a strip known as the ‘golden mile’ – an area where conditions are arid and grapes are grown in stone beds. Except for one stubborn sheep farmer’s paddock, the mid-Wairau Valley real estate is packed with Sav vineyards. These arid conditions are perfect, Tim explains later back at The Shack, because a Sav is a “vigorous wine”, so the stony soil “keeps the water levels and the grape’s vigor in check.”

However, in composing their wine, Cloudy Bay also add a few grapes from the Southern Valley to act as the ‘salt and pepper’ for the wine, in order to hit a stone fruit flavour mark. “We’re definitely staying away from the green notes – we have enough of that here in Marlborough – and if anything we’re leaning in a little towards the tropical.”

Those are words we hear often during the trip: green, tropical and stone fruit. There are a few hardcore wine experts amongst us media and I hear them speak the same language as the winemakers which provokes me to ask Tim about the cordoned off descriptors, or to put it more bluntly, why the lack of vocabulary? “The more I’ve worked with wine, the less I compare it with other things – one man’s lemon is another man’s pineapple, and I definitely won’t say that tastes like pineapple grown in the sun. So I keep it broad – tropical, stonefruit, citrusy, green.” Tim says while siphoning some of the gawky teenage wines directly from the barrel for us to try. “I could say cut grass, and you could say cut grass but who really knows what that means without trying it.”

Besides narrowing down on superfluous descriptors, Cloudy Bay and many of the other wineries in the Wairau Valley have also begun advocating for a tightening up on the Marlborough name. Over the aforementioned delightful picnic lunch a debate begins about the future of the Wairau Valley.

New Zealand being part of what’s known as the new world of winemaking has an incredible amount of leeway in terms of how wines are classified and grown. Which lends to certain innovations: the Cloudy Bay Pinot Noir would probably not have existed had the entire Marlborough been locked down as Sav country, nor would Cloudy Bay probably have been able to explore winemaking techniques to create their stunning guava-like Ti Koko wine – which is basically a modified Sav stored in various French oak barrels instead of the usual steel barrels.

In the old world of winemaking things are much are stringent. The appellation system determines everything to the smallest degree – the date of harvest, which varietal can be grown in which geographic region etc. – before a wine can earn the right to have a certain name. Champagne, the sparkling wine, is one of the best known examples of that very regulatory system. These regulations may mean a certain uniformity as well as pedigree protection is achieved, but certainly don’t allow for any playfulness or adaptability.

Although New Zealand’s brave new world of grape growing has been a lot freer and more pioneering than its old world counterpart, the Valley has started to see the need to begin regulation. “Right now an Aussie brand can blend a tiny percentage of Marlborough with other wine, and still use the Marlborough name”, Tim says over our idyllic aforementioned picnic lunch. In other words, basically capitalising on a well-known name and dragging it to the ground with a lesser product.

After taking a string of old sheep paddocks thirty years ago and turning them into a winery which grows internationally renowned and accolade-ridden wine, it’ll be interesting to see how Cloudy Bay develops in a future which may be much more modulated, but also protected.

I finish my last glass of wine and contemplate silhouette of Mount Riley (the mountain forming part of the wine label). I can’t say I’m brave enough to absolutely shake my wariness towards Sauvignon Blanc in general, but I will and can say I trust the Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc (and especially their Ti Koko variation) with my mouth entirely. They’re delicious. With or without a steak pie to wash them down.