I’m delighted to visiting Huia this evening, as I’m in Marlborough for a few days, some of which is over the weekend. So, although I can visit the Cellar Doors, the market and such, I’m at a bit of a loose end come the evenings. Generally I’m Billy No Mates with Netflix. So when Tom said come over at 7pm on Saturday, I probably said ‘yes’ with unseemly haste.
I’ve not been to the Cellar Door before, and although we’ve had a few email conversations, this is the first time I’m meeting Tom Pegler, who took over at Huia two and a half years ago. I did get sent a box of their wines at the end of last year, so have tried quite a few of the range, including an interesting wine called ‘Tangle’ which is a white blend.
It is 31 years since Huia was started being planted. On the way in there was a large patch where vines had been taken out. Tom explains “We did that at the end of last harvest. Unfortunately with the viticulture techniques in the early days not being great, the economic life of some of these vines is not what it should be. We’ve learnt the hard way that Clone 115 is hard to make money off. Talking to another winery down the road, they were getting three tonnes a hectare from vines which were fifteen years old. I guess it is going to be similar to the make-up that’s here.
There might be a little bit of extra ones. Half the Home Block here is planted in Sauvignon Blanc. We’ve got Chardonnay and a bit of Pinot in behind us. The Syrah down the front there was Claire’s passion project. I scratch my head thinking about what to do with it, because it is only 0.3 of a hectare. I think we had sixty litres last year! It’s a bit tricky down there for Syrah because it is a bit rocky and it doesn’t like it. We’ll give it a year off this year and allow it a year just to focus on root development”.
I pitch in with a great idea: “I’ve already tried two expressions of Petit Manseng since I’ve been here – give that a go!” But Tom reels my enthusiasm back in with “We get to retain our acidity so much here in Marlborough, and Petit Manseng is such an acidic variety that you end up with a TA of 15 when you come to pick it. It is exciting to see people doing different things though”.
He first moved down to Marlborough when, after studying Food Science, he got into bottling wine. It being the biggest gig in town, he ended up in wine. “If you had asked me fresh out of High School what I’d be doing, I probably wouldn’t have said that for a career I’d be working in wine”
“One of the challenges we have as an industry is engaging new drinkers and how we can do that. If you’re trying to make wine and trying to have it the same every year, then I think you’re in trouble. Every year is different. Different weather means the grapes evolve differently as they ripen. Wine is not some standard factory-made product. In some ways, Marlborough sauvignon has become that though. That’s the battle overseas. If you have people who are really only familiar with what is exported in big quantities, then it is something to try and get them to understand that not all Marlborough Sav is the same”.
Winemaker Josh Lee arrives. We’d met at the New Zealand International Wine Show.
“When this was an apple orchard and was then planted to grapes, people were nervous that grapes wouldn’t get ripe in this part of the valley. I don’t know if you’ve driven out recently, but it goes for about an hour’s drive now! You don’t have to go too far past where the last vineyards are now, and you’re in the Rainbow skifield.
The bar of 18 brix to qualify for something like AMW, is very achievable. Although there are certain wineries in Marlborough who are picking earlier than that and adding a lot of sugar. But that’s probably more about the fact that they can’t physically get it through the winery fast enough. So they have to start picking on this date, even though they run all day and all night. AMW will audit you for the brix requirement – we got audited a couple of weeks ago. We are picking at 23 brix, so for us we’re well past that! (laughs).
There’s exceptions – if you want to make a low-alcohol wine. It also has to be 100% from Marlborough and you have to pass the Tasting Panel – that’s the tricky part. I’m one of the three judges on the panel. If one of the judges fails it on one of the parameters, you’ve failed. So it can like ‘Oh you didn’t quite have the aromatic intensity’. You have a discussion, but if it comes down to it and one person fails it…and we’ve failed quite a few on the panels we’ve been on. There is an appeal process, so it can come back for another go. Sometimes people submit wines before they’re bottle ready. And we always tell people why they’ve failed”.
Tom adds: “We’ve only had our Sauvignon Blanc through AMW, but there are more varietals now – Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir”
WF: Pinot Noir makes sense to me. I can see that really fitting the bill. I think it can really show more of that sub-regional definition.
Josh: People still want and search out high quality wines. AMW is a cool part of the process of protecting that. If you look at these associations around the world – I worked in Spain for a while for a great Cava producer – and they formed a similar type of body. There, Freixenet are like the Indevin of Spain, so they banded together and have been pretty successful. Just us at Huia don’t have the ability to fight the fight; but if there’s fifty of us, we might stand a chance”.
Tom: The other issue with meeting the 18 brix standard is those vineyards that just carry too heavy a crop, because they’re going for twenty-something tonnes a hectare, is if you have a year like 2022 when it is wet. The wineries who are harvesting at 16 or 17 brix because they want to get something while they still can. It is only just starting to gather awareness, even in the industry. It is good for a consumer to see the AMW sticker and get an assurance that this is a solid wine.
Josh: Regulation is a blessing and a curse. If we want to do a little trial with Riesling and it doesn’t work, you can blend it into the Sav if you wanted to. We wouldn’t do that here, but we can. In some appellations around the world, you’d have no freedom to do that. It’s cool that we have this Syrah and we can do it. At the moment it is just sitting in barrel, but we have options.
Tom: It’s the reason Hans Herzog came here – because he was restricted to three varieties. Yesterday we had a tasting with some media who are here after the Pinot Conference, and Anna had her blended Syrah and Pinot which is a really cool wine. It doesn’t have those medicinal cool-climate flavours that you think of Marlborough Syrah having. I don’t know whether it is a because it is a blend of, I think, 60% Pinot, or whether the low-yielding that they’re doing in their vineyard, through crop-loading”.
We step out of the rapidly-cooling evening, and into the winery. I spy a rather large barrel, and Josh tells me it holds 12,700 litres. I’d call it a ‘Cuve’, but he tells me his daughter calls it ‘the big barrel’. I’m not sure how big a ‘Fuder’ is – I’ve seen them, but Tom tells me they are usually 1500-2000 litres. Josh has a plan to put Sauvignon Blanc in it this year as an experiment. “You’ve got to try these things out and see how they go”.
WF: Do you do weird and wonderful little trials of things, like skin ferments and pied de cuve?
Josh: Our Sav is all Pied de Cuve. Last year I inoculated one tank, which went into a second label that we do. We pick about two tonnes a week early, press it, stick some in one of these little tanks, and kegs and barrels which get put in the vineyard. Wait for them to start and then just use that to inoculate everything else. It is a pretty cool way of doing it rather than using packaged yeasts. We do need the Sav to get on though. It is OK if you’re doing riesling and can let it go slowly on. At Prophets Rock, Paul was doing two year ferments of Gris.
Is it necessarily better for it though? If you’ve got 5 grams of sugar left and want it completely dry – adding some yeast is not going to change the flavour too much. It will get dry and then you can protect it. But we’ll see. I’m not dogmatic about that sort of thing. Some things just take forever. Our bubbles base from ’24 hasn’t finished going through malo…so we wait until it’s done. I’m not going to rush it too much.
WF: Do you do your own Méthode production here, or send it over to No.1?
Josh: Yes, we send it – we have the gear here, but they’ve just got better gear, and honestly I don’t think it affects how the wine tastes at all. If you do it badly it can do, of course. So it absolutely makes more sense for them to do it.
Tom: The dosage machine that Huia had just wasn’t dosing reliably, so you couldn’t get consistency between bottles. And that’s not a good way to be. You have to make a lot more than we do to justify more investment. For the scale of Marlborough, we’re pretty small. 20,000 litres are our biggest tanks, and Whitehaven next door are by no means the biggest, but I think they’ll have tanks the size of which would fit our entire annual production in one tank.
WF: Obviously, we’ve met whilst judging – do Huia enter shows?
Josh: We don’t really enter our wines into shows – we have done the Marlborough Show a couple of times, which is good to support – but it’s not really our bag, here. We prefer to have conversations like we are today. In a line up, especially if you’re doing something a bit different like we are, you get lost.
Are you a riesling person? We’ve done a really cool riesling I’d like to show you. It’s still in barrel.
This isn’t quite finished obviously – it’s just come off cold and I need to add some sulphur to it, but it’s a cool little project we’ve done this year. Two blocks, and most of it from a biodynamic block down the Waihopai Valley. We are lucky to have a bloke who works vintage with us and is a riesling fanatic. He’s got a whole sleeve tattoo about riesling!
So for this, we got it quite ripe and foot-stomped it and left it for about 12 hours. We pressed it on the bubble cycle then wild fermented it in puncheons and barriques. I was quite determined to do something different to the majority of riesling in Marlborough. We make all of our wines with real intent. I don’t want to feel like “Oh I’ve got to make a ‘this’ and schlep it in tank with some yeast because we have a gap in our range.
WF: Wow, the perfume is sensational, and I love that texture. I’m picking it is about 5 grams residual, but it tastes more generous than that.
Tom: I think having that vision of what the end product will be like is important. Being small gives that connection with what we make. Because if you’re crushing tens of thousands of tonnes of grapes, then it is not so much about the wines, it’s about numbers and analytics.
Josh: For me, I don’t want to make a completely wild style of wine that almost nobody wants to drink, or is only loved by fanatics of brett and VA. I want to make things like this that I think people will like but it is different.
Tom: With Huia it is about wines that are balanced and elegant, that people can enjoy. In terms of something like winning a show – our wines are atypical for Marlborough and New Zealand. As well as we make them, they’re not necessarily going to win Gold.
WF: I do love your new labels by the way. I just got sent the AMW box of Sauvignon Blanc, and your wines stand out now when you look at a range. I can’t remember seeing so many positive reactions to a re-branded label, like I have with that.
Tom: The old branding has been around for a long time. It’s a really cool design. It’s a little bit scary to think that we think it looks cool, but are people going to buy it. It’s one thing to grab attention initially, but here we’ve got the varietal off to the side which is scary. We’re not looking for something only appeals to one demographic, but we did want something modern – that was the key thing.
In New Zealand, our Blanc de Blancs is the biggest selling wine that we have, but in terms of what we make it isn’t big in quantity. It would be good to get more of the still wines out there in New Zealand. Our Blanc de Blancs is still riddled by hand. We just get a better result than using a machine. I don’t know who else in New Zealand would do hand-riddling. There’s a guy at No.1 who is their specialist at disgorging, and he does tell us that ours disgorges really well. We’ve got those racks stacked up in the corner there – if we put them all up we would have 6000 bottles on them.
WF: How many tonnes can you put through your winery?
Josh: We are limited because our presses are pretty tiny. We’re going to do about 350 tonnes this year. I heard that 430 tonnes was the biggest they put through before. We are seeing more and more bad weather at vintage – they are getting shorter and more compact.
Tom: There were also more grapes available locally – that you could just bring over with a small truck. You could spread your harvest out a lot easier back in the day. The size of the industry here now means the contractors just want to ‘bang, bang and go’ as they’ve got so much to do.
Another challenge is that some things like the ‘Tangle’ wine – is doing a bit better in New Zealand than we thought it would do, which is a good problem to have. We didn’t budget on making any in 2025. Judging by many of the ’24 wines, Josh is doing an amazing job.
WF: Is this your main job – full time, or are you a consultant?
Josh: Full time here. This job popped up and I thought “Yes!!”. Huia has been a good brand for such a long time. And quality, but could do with some fresh energy.
Tom: Let’s start with some Méthode shall we?
WF: Oh, and this is the new packaging? No foil on top – I like that. It’s a bit different.
Josh: We dispensed with the foil because it’s just rubbish. It just comes off and goes in the bin, right? We talk about the environment all the time – we’re biodynamic, and then that is just creating landfill. That’s why it’s not there. The wine is mainly from this block, right here. Barrel fermented and then decanted into that smaller Cuve for a year.
WF: This is gorgeous. I can see the time in the barrel in this wine.
Josh: One of the distinctive things about Huia is the time we’re able to give things. Most people don’t have the luxury of putting aside for a year – they’ve got to get it tiraged and disgorge it in 18 months, because it has got to be on the shelf. This was tiraged then four years in bottle before it was disgorged. I’m then keen for it have a minimum of three months – after it is labelled and ready to go. With disgorging you see it jumping around a little bit – a bit of bottle shock.
WF: I also wanting to check in with you about Chardonnay – as I would certainly put your Chardonnay into that ‘not your average’ category.
Tom: Definitely not in terms of how much new French oak is in it. Which is about 8%. The winemaking and fermentation is pretty similar to most, I would have thought, Chardonnays in new Zealand. The Clone 95 Chardonnay from here definitely has distinct fruit characters.
Josh, No, there’s nothing special. It has wild malo and having good grapes means we don’t have to do any great tricks. That’s half the work already done. I worked at Dog Point for a while and they make some quite reductive wines, but beautiful wines.
WF: Is there anything else that you guys would like to make?
Josh: I want to create a bit of a dosage library. I want to start holding back some barrels of base wines so I have a library to create a more interesting dose.
WF: What’s the difference between having Reserve wine and Dosage wine?
Josh: You might build up a reserve wine holding to make a non-vintage. You can add up to 15% and still call it Vintage, not that we would. The reason I’d do this is I’ve done dose trials in the past, and the great thing about Sparkling is that you’ve got one more chance to make a change. You taste, for example one of those bottles that are riddled out there, and think ‘what’s missing?’ or ‘what could I do better here?’ Sometimes after four years on lees there’s a hole in the middle of the palate. You can end up doing some really cool tweaks and changes with that system.
Where I worked in Spain they had a quite a few soleras and one of them was 150 years old. You’re tasting that and it just tastes like hazelnuts. So interesting to think about what was going on when they started that solera 150 years ago. I’m going to be long dead but I’m starting to think about it in that kind of way. I want to elevate the winemaking to that sort of level. Variety-wise, Syrah is quite cool. It tasted awesome last year, but whether we’ll get the volume to do anything is another question.
Tom: Huia was always known for Gewürz in the past, and that’s a challenging one because the market for it is so small. There’s three puncheons of that riesling that you sampled, which is a tiny volume wine for us.
Josh: It would be cool to give Gewürz a go – if we could get a tonne of it.
Tom: This is the previous incarnation of ‘Tangle’ – I think it was 47% Gris. That’s a variety that Claire and Mike flirted with. But we can’t all be like Hans Herzog and have varieties for Africa.
Josh: Blending is such an interesting experience. The 2024 Tangle which you tasted – I was really pleased that that became a better blend than it was as individual components. Fantastic when that happens, as you always want that to work. When I made it I tried to make each part so that it could stand on its own as a wine that could be bottled. But when I put them together I thought ‘this is something better’ You keep coming back to the trials and ‘should I put 10% here, or some back in here’. Sometimes you’ll get two wines that are, I don’t know – raspberry-ish or something – and you put them together and somehow it goes away (laughs).
It’s nice to do those wines that make themselves – like Chardonnay. Where it is just ‘if I do my job, then it is what it is – I just haven’t stuffed it up’. Whereas something like Tangle, it’s much more a winemaker’s wine. As Tom said earlier – it has been more successful than anticipated – in the New Zealand market people seem to be into it.
WF: It’s not your conventional blend, but it works.
Josh: We don’t have any Viognier for 2025 so we’ll have to find something else to go in. I’m not sure what I’m going to do yet.
Tom: It is interesting how it works just as a blend of grapes. The most consistent in recent years – for the Tangle blend – is having about a third Chardonnay in it. But unfortunately we just didn’t have the Chardonnay, but it looks like we can use the Pinot Gris successfully in place of it. It’s almost like a different take on a PGR blend.
Josh: I’m stoked about this Sauvignon Blanc – and that it made the AMW selection box. It’s all pied de cuve fermentation and that is very unusual for Marlborough. Many people will do a wild ‘component’ but we pressed it a little bit early and get it in the vineyard to get it fermenting. We use that to inoculate everything else. And then just a really slow ferment because that yeast just isn’t that strong. It took weeks and weeks to get through. About 8% of it was fermented in puncheon. It is around 3.5 grams of residual at the end, which is fairly dry for a Sav these days.
WF: I like that richness. I think when I reviewed it I said it was ‘as Old World as it is New World’ without being specific. It has as much Alsace about it, as it does white Bordeaux or Sancerre.
Josh: That’s absolutely what I was going for. Winemaking in New Zealand is a modern, sensible industry but doesn’t perhaps have some of the tradition. We’ve used pied de cuve and puncheon ferment to bring that older method in. I think this is unmistakably a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc but there’s something extra.
Tom: Just that little bit of oak makes a difference.
WF: I think there’s more to it than just that. It’s more than ‘we put a bit through in barrel’.
Josh: Quite a bit of the oak-fermented Sav did make it into this. It wasn’t just a case of it had to have some in it – we tasted everything blind. We try all the components first and make sure there’s nothing wrong with any of them.
One of the barrel portions from one of the best vineyards that I put so much care and attention to – didn’t make it in. Which is fine, because other stuff did better than we thought. One of the blocks I thought ‘well this is definitely going to go into the second tier’ when I first looked at it. And it was probably my pick of the whole vintage.
WF: It is refreshing to hear that that’s how you do it, and you’re that pragmatic, that it can happen like that.
Josh: I worked for Berry Bros for a while in London and there was an MW there – can’t remember his name – but he said something that really stuck with me “Is it good to drink? – that’s all that matters!”
WF: My rule no.1 is “is it delicious?” When I arrived in New Zealand over twenty years ago, i didn’t know that much about the local wines, so I had to trust someone as a guide. I found that I liked two sources. No.1 was Raymond Chan. I like what he liked, I found. And the other was the old Cuisine tastings when it was John Belsham in charge. I’ve literally taken a page torn out of a Cuisine magazine on my first trip to Queenstown and went around looking for the wines on that list. And that’s how I learnt. I’d like to think that now both of those have gone – or changed at least – that some people trust what I write and follow my lead.
Tom: At the end of the day it is about what people like and that’s important.
