New Zealand Wines Muddy Water - Australian Gourmet Traveller Wine Magazine

December2003/January 2004

By Paul White

Muddy Water

Winemakers who are equally expert at grape growing are a special breed. The French make no distinction between winemaker and grapegrower, understanding that when grapes are grown well by a vigneron, the wine pretty much makes itself. But the divide between growing grapes and making wine is much deeper in Australasia.

Belinda Gould of Waipara's Muddy Water, in New Zealand, knows every vine in her vineyard. She's just as happy out pruning and picking as she is cajoling wine in the barrel further down the line. And you can taste all that in the glass.

Gould started her career wanting to do field-grafting and nursery work. She did her first overseas stint in 1981 as a guest student at Germany's famous Geisenheim Institute before moving on to nurseries in Germany, Italy and Bordeaux. Growing grapes naturally gave Gould a desire to make sure the grapes didn't get ruined in the winery.

Between 1993 and 1997 Gould established her winemaking career at Waipara Springs in New Zealand's North Canterbury. To learn more about natural-yeast fermentation and gravity-fed production she then headed off to do the 1996 vintage at California's Calera Wine Company.

Calera is pinot-centric and staunchly terroirist. Owner Josh Jensen's radical approach pioneered multiple single vineyard bottlings with whole-cluster, natural-yeast ferments and no filtration.

Jensen eventually asked Gould to be Calera's winemaker, which she was from 1997 to 1999. But home beckoned. One day, Mike and Jane East rang her from Waipara and said the vineyard they'd planted back in 1993 was ready for its own winemaker. Gould accepted the job.She wanted a small operation that would allow her as much time in the vineyard as the winery and Muddy Water seemed perfect.

"Muddy Water was conceived as much out of passion for pinot noir as any rational thought," co-owner Jane East says. Its 20 acres were originally planted mostly to pinot, chardonnay and riesling, with a few acres in sauvignon blanc and a five acre experimental parcel.

After Gould arrived, they top-grafted the sauvignon to new Dijon-clone pinot noir, and topped the experimental range over to syrah and pinotage. Although the latter was a bold move, both varieties ripened with excellent-quality fruit.

Pinot takes up a lot of Gould's time. She shares vine yard work with viticulturist, Gwyn Williams. Once in the cellar, her handling strategies are pure cool-climate, low-intervention pinot noir. The grapes go through a 10-day pre-maceration as they wait for the natural-yeasts to kick in - a cold soak that is a more gentle way to extract colour, tannins and flavours than a post-fermentation steep in alcohol.

Then its into open-top fermenters and hand-plunged to keep the cap from drying out and souring. It is matured in a mix of new and old French barrels.Throughout this process, the mix is gravity-fed, carefully racked and never filtered. All this plays out in lifted aromatics, tinged with dried-herb clonal notes and seamless, velvety textures full of savoury fruits, neatly bound up with fine tannins and racy acids. In short, it's a very sexy pinot.

Gould is also responsible for making Waipara's first syrah, probably the most southerly-produced syrah in the world. Loving its 'funkyness', she calls syrah her 'big pinot', which makes sense because its treated exactly like pinot noir in field and cellar.The resultant syrah is lovely. Singing out through lifted floral high notes is a leathery,cedary contralto; there are savoury flavours, dried red and black fruits at mid-range, and a silky, deeply viscous, multi-textured baseline lies underneath. This is syrah the Burgundians would make-if they could. It truly behaves and feels like 'big' pinot.

So if syrah is 'big' pinot, what's 'little'? Pinotage, of course. When Gould first joined Muddy Water, she had to be steered nto taking pinotage seriously. She was profoundly unimpressed with brettanomyces taint in some South African pinotages, finding them bitter, hard and often with a metallic, silverbeet character.

Taking it back to the drawing board, once again pinot noir offered a template.Gould now sees the difference between Kiwi and South African pinotages as climatic. "The South African climate ripens it quicker, making it seem more steely, but ours makes it more fruity and pinot-like. While it can be a bit too in-your-face, ultimately it could be to New Zealand what zinfandel is to California."

Waipara also has a solid reputation for producing fine riesling. Gould inherited two Muddy Water styles. The first was dry and had a huge following. The second, a semi-sweet, botrytis-affected version called James Hardwick. Originally she wanted to sweeten up the dry and dry up the sweet, amalgamating them somewhere in the middle. Fortunately the punters wouldn't let her.

Instead her solution was to make both more seriously. "Riesling is so delicate,"Gould says. "We (put a lot of effort into) controlling phenolics through very low SO2, sorting out botrytis, cooling fruit, whole -cluster pressing." Muddy Water upped the ante further with native yeasts, old-barrel fermentation and no filtration. As focused and linear as a laser beam, its rieslings walk on the wild side.

(Abridged version)