Craggy Range are celebrating this week after scooping a prestigious ‘Best in Show’ honour at this year’s Decanter World Wine Awards. Craggy Range Martinborough Pinot Noir 2024 was the only wine from New Zealand to get the top honour. The 200+ judges tasted thousands of wines from 57 countries and only the top 50 make the ‘Best in Show’ list. That amounts to just 0.3% of all wines tasted.
The judges had this to say about the Craggy Range Pinot Noir: “Of the six Pinot Noirs from New Zealand to feature in our Top 50 selections since 2018, this is the third to come from Wairarapa’s Martinborough (the other three, unsurprisingly, have been Central Otago wines). This is an uncompromisingly dark wine that plays to New Zealand’s strengths in terms of purity and vivacity of fruit: raspberry, cherry and plum come streaming from the glass, and the fine meshing of fruit and oak in this wine adds to its lustre and appeal. In the mouth, the wine is both long and broad but not in any way clumsy, and the fruit flavours (raspberry to the fore again) are hypnotic. Svelte tannins are barely palpable, so there’s no textural barrier to entry”.
The other big winner was another Pinot – McArthur Ridge, Southern Tor Pinot Noir 2023 from the Alexandra Basin in Central Otago, which won a ‘Platinum Award’ after scoring 97/100pts. The tasting notes for this one were equally effusive… “Phenomenal layers of crushed raspberry, plum, black cherry and dried herbs amid moments of vanilla and baking spice. Stately and plush with juicy acidity and scores of ardent tannins which lay the foundations for ageing. Divine”.
In global terms, New Zealand finished 11th with a total of 303 medals when all the Best in Show, platinum, gold, silver and bronze awards handed out by Decanter are tallied up. France, Italy and Spain were the top three countries.
