Bauer up for wine Oscar

CHEERS: Barton on Wine

Anyone  who in 2001 attended the first of the symposiums that every two years attracts a star-studded cast from around the world to New Zealand to taste and to talk about pinot noir will remember an exchange between notable, no-nonsense Australian pinot producer Garry Farr and Central Otago winemaker Rudi Bauer.

As I recall it Rudi Bauer suggested that the formidable Mr Farr had side-stepped a question involving the classy pinot noirs he produces under the Bannockburn label in Victoria, and insisted that he answer it.

What followed was a brief but fiery public exchange that served to introduce Rudi Bauer to anyone who didn't already know him and confirmed for those who did, his passion for what he does, where he does it and especially for the great red wine of Burgundy.

Next week, when the fourth biennial pinot noir conference convenes in Wellington, Rudi will be in the spotlight again – this time as the first New Zealand winemaker ever to be nominated for the prestigious international Der Feinschmecker Wine Awards' Winemaker of the Year award.

He is one of only six to be nominated for the award, the equivalent of a wine-world Oscar, which goes to "a personality from the international scene who has continued to produce top wines and who has an outstanding reputation as a winemaker beyond German frontiers".

And according to British wine writer Oz Clarke, who has endorsed the nomination, Rudi stands every chance against the other nominees "all top fellows" from Portugal, France, Germany, Italy and Austria, where Rudi grew up and studied winemaking and viticulture.

He came to New Zealand on a six-month visa in the mid-1980s to work as assistant winemaker at Mission Estate, near Napier, and developed an interest in pinot noir working the 1987 vintage in Oregon, in the United States.

In 1989 he became the winemaker at Rippon, in Wanaka, and quickly decided there was a better chance for creating something-wines of his own – in New Zealand, Central Otago in particular, than there was back home in Europe.

The plan that would enable him to do so was developed during the five years he spent making wine for the Giesen Brothers and in 1996 he formed a partnership with Dunedin businessman Trevor Scott, French winemaker Clothilde Chauvet (of Marc Chauvet Champagne) and Heather and John Perrium, the owners of Bendigo Station.

The station, which sits astride New Zealand's largest quartz deposit near Cromwell, was identified by Rudi as good winegrowing country and its planting in 1998 marked the establishment of a new and important wine-growing sub-region in Central.

The rest is history. The methode traditionelles first produced by Quartz Reef as a back-up, in case anything ever went wrong with the pinot noir, are now among New Zealand's finest and most Champagne-like and the pinot noirs are as outstanding as he suggested they would be – "a symphony of flavours".

The only other wine produced is a consistently mouth-filling pinot gris that also has a following.

Consistency is also key when in comes to the pinot noirs-a $39 a-bottle model which offers outstanding quality and value for money and the more cerebral Bendigo Estate single ferment which sells at $75 a bottle or $150 for a magnum.

To be poured at the Pinot Noir 2010 in Wellington next will be the savoury, complex 2006 Quartz Reef, which has appreciated time in the bottle; the fragrant, succulent 2007 and from 2008, which is just coming on to the market, another generous wine that fulfills Rudi's aim of simply passing on the message from the vineyard to the people who drink that wine that it produces.

The winner of the award, of winemaking Oscar for which Rudi has been nominated will be named on March 20 at the Grand Hotel Schloss Bensberg in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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