HOW prudent we Irish wine lovers are to have worked so hard, of late, at our consumption figures! The reward is instant. The more we drink, the more there is to drink, as producer countries come knocking on our door, offering an ever wider range of worthwhile wines. A few weeks ago it was the turn of New Zealand, a small but dynamic player on the international scene.
At a wine fair in Dublin Castle organised by the Wine Institute of New Zealand and the New Zealand Trade Development Board, 19 producers presented over 100 wines. It was a great opportunity to get to grips with the impressive output of a country in which Irish wine drinkers have, I think, a natural interest. Why should that be? "Maybe because of our similar situation, as a small island nation up against a bigger neighbour. Maybe because we imagine New Zealand, with its mountains and sheep, as a close scenic equivalent to Ireland, give or take a few vineyards. And because the wines are generally so good.
To judge, from the persistent sounds of lipsmacking approval, this Dublin tasting must definitely have achieved its objective of raising the profile, of New Zealand wine in the Irish market. A vital and necessary task, it must be said, since Ireland in the year just ended bought only one per cent of New Zealand's wine exports. When you bear in mind that New Zealand's total production represents less than one per cent of, total world production, you see what a miniscule drop of Kiwi wine we drink. But all that is set to change. We'll soon see more New Zealand wines on Irish shelves, as importers here sign new deals. That trend will continue if the New Zealand wine industry keeps growing at anything like its reported current rate, with two new wineries opening every month.
It has developed with the power and speed of an All Blacks front-line assault. "Ten years ago we could have been forgiven for asking, `New Zealand? Do they make wine?'," Rosemary George writes in the opening of her useful new book, The Wines Of New Zealand (Faber, £9.99). The wine that seduced our palates, back in the mid-1980s, was Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough in the cool north-east of the South Island. Hugely aromatic, it gave us a completely new taste - an amazing depth of gooseberry fruit flavour that was typical of the New World, allied with a piercing acidity that seemed more at home on the Loire. Cloudy Bay was, and still is, the benchmark for New Zealand Sauvignon - the wine that demonstrates most powerfully how sublime the style can be. It has become a cult, so popular, even at around £17, that there's scarcely a bottle to be found.
The New Zealand wine fair provided fascinating evidence of where the industry has moved since then. Sauvignon Blanc in a different style again is coming to us from Gisborne and Hawkes Bay on the eastern side of the North Island. Here, a climate warmer than Marlborough's produces softer wines with less of the gooseberry and cut-grass characteristics we've come to expect, and more tropical fruit flavours - pineapple, for instance, and passion fruit. These two regions are also producing Chardonnays with tropical fruit notes - softer and creamier than the leaner Chardonnays of Marlborough. There are vast variations in the use of oak, from subtle to so overpowering - in Robert Parker's rather unkind phrase - as to turn off a wine-loving lumberjack but subtlety seems to be winning.
Red wine production is also increasing and improving. Here the out-and-out winner is Pinot Noir from Martinborough, in the southern tip of the North Island. The one disappointment of the Dublin Castle tasting was that there weren't more examples to savour, given the frequent rave reviews of New Zealand Pinots in the wine press - but again, production is limited and perhaps it was felt that Ireland might not swoon with excitement over a big range of reds at around £15 a bottle. Instead, there were plenty of Cabernet/Merlot blends on offer Here as so often with wine taste divides the tasters. I'm on the "anti" side so far, I'm afraid. Those herbaceous cool-climate flavours which taste so stunning in Sauvignon Blanc tend to make Cabernet too overpoweringly stalky for my liking - even when it's softened by Merlot, as is generally the case.
That may change, of course - just as the nature of the New Zealand wines exported in the near future changes. In the red corner, we're likely to see more Syrah (deliberately not called Shiraz so that there is no confusion with Australia); in the white, more Riesling and more sparklers. In the mean-time, white magic remains New Zealand's forte - and even without waiting for the recent wine fair to bear fruit, we have scores of super Sauvignons and, Chardonnays to sample. Apart from the producers listed below, "look out for the wines of Esk Valley and Kemblefield, both in Hawkes Bay; Hunter's, Stoneleigb and, Nautilus, all in Marlborough; Wairau River in Martinborough; and Kumeu River in Auckland - source of the most delectable but probably also the most expensive Chardonnay of them all.