Flying under the pinot radar

Food & Wine Bran biscuits Beer drinkers turn to small producers She's a hard road knocking off this Southern icon IPhone software delivers dinner deals direct Bringing home the yacon Going native at Beervana worth trying Dinner in a jiffy Martinborough not the only jewel in the Wairarapa Wine label code links to online information Successful chocolatiers eye exports Back in January Matthew Jukes and Tyson Stelzer, a couple of the world's smartest young wine-writers, announced their third Great New Zealand Pinot Noir Classification which was developed, they say, to highlight the importance of our finest pinot noirs.

The classification is based on a rolling average of the five most recent vintages of the wines involved and as you might expect was dominated by pinot noirs from Central Otago and from Martinborough.

Tucked among these wines, however, were four from the Waipara region region in north Canterbury, which was subsequently visited by Jukes, the British half of the winewriting duo (Stelzer is an Australian) whose views are read by up to nine million people weekly in London's Daily Mail, in MoneyWeek and sometimes in Decanter magazine.

Suffice to say that the wine community at large sits up and take notice when Jukes observes that "Some of the world's finest pinots come from this virtually unknown, boutique wine region in the South Island of NZ ..." as he did last week in MoneyWeek.

He goes on to say: "Heroic names like Pyramid Valley, Bell Hill and Pegasus Bay are already on the shrewdest of collectors' lists.

"Their wines are staggeringly serious, but they all stay well under the radar."

Likewise the other winery to have reached these heights, he says – Mountford, "an incredible estate set to rock the palates of the wine cognoscenti".

Jukes describes the Mountford pinots as "beautiful, full of vitality and class, utterly captivating", and says in his final pronouncement: "There are very few wineries which have yet to be `discovered' these days, particularly in the pinot noir field (the most difficult and sensitive of all), but I can say for certain that Mountford is teetering on the edge of superstardom."

For that it owes much to CP Lin, a remarkable Chinese winemaker who has been blind since the age of two, speaks five languages and has a degree in mathematics as well as wine science.

He got his start in the business back in 1996 after telling Michael Eaton, the founder of Mountford, that his wines were crap.

Then, the story goes, during a tour of the vineyards CP asked who was smoking a Monte Christo Cuban cigar.

It was Michael, who was so impressed by CP's talent for taste and smell that he virtually offered him the winemaking job on the spot.

Since then much has changed.

The winery is now owned by Kathryn Ryan and Kees Zeestraten who have doubled the size of processing facilities and planted additional grapes. But Mountford's aim remains the same: with the help biodynamics, where necessary, and an extraordinarily gifted winemaker, to produce wines of quality and excellence.

Ad Feedback CP insists that his blindness neither helps nor hinders the process, though he does concede that often when you lose one sense others are heightened.

But much of it's intuitive, he says.

Others who know and appreciate his wines, would prefer to call it a dedication to perfection driven by a passion for wine and for pinot in particular.

This includes a recognition of Burgundian techniques and tradition, including the tramping of grapes used in the making of Mountford's super-premium The Gradient pinot noir, which sells for about $160 a bottle.

The 2006 is still available in limited quantity and so, if you are lucky, is the 2006 estate ($60-plus) which got Matthew Jukes' juices running. The 2007 estate, however, is already sold out.

The good news is that two cheaper examples of CP Lin's handiwork, the smoky, intensely flavoured 2007 Liasion pinot noir (about $45) and the drink-now Village pinot noir (about $35) are still available.

Mountford also produces a very serious chardonnay (about $50), pinot gris (about $30), a noble riesling (about $30) and a white called Hommage a'l'Alsace (about $50) which is made of gewurztraminer, pinot gris, riesling and muscat processed in a single batch.

This flies under the radar, too.