Wine frontiers pushed back

KUROW VILLAGE LABEL: One of Antonio Pasquale's promising early wines.

PURIST: Blending grape varieties intrigues Antonio Pasquale.

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After working at the forefront of thought, Italian Doctor of Philosophy Antonio Pasquale turned his talents to pushing back the frontiers of wine.

His sense of adventure brought Antonio Pasquale and his family to New Zealand.

Since leaving his post at Padua University and moving to New Zealand little more than a decade ago, he has pioneered vineyards in South Canterbury's Hakataramea Valley and opened the first winery in the neighbouring Waitaki Valley last year.

It was his sense of adventure and search for a better life that brought Pasquale and his family to New Zealand.

Coming from a long line of Italian winemakers and merchants, it wasn't long before he spotted land on a farm he owned that he felt would be good for growing vines.

This was in the viticultural terra incognita of the Hakataramea Valley. While it possessed the limestone soils known for making many of the world's greatest wines, it also had an extremely dry climate on the cusp of successful vinegrowing.

"We really didn't know how our vines would grow, how difficult it would be or whether we'd had the right idea," Pasquale recalls. "But I did have a fair idea of what I wanted to achieve: to make wines with a minerality and acid balance that would be at once enjoyable and engaging - wines that make you think."

Pasquale's desire for his wines to provoke both thought and pleasure also extends to their labels. Each vintage of his Pasquale reserve range sports a different Latin motto and features a five-pointed star, whose proportions conform to the Greeks' mysterious and mathematically significant "golden number" phi.

Pasquale obviously likes to challenge and be challenged. Not content to plant in a new area, he also trialled grape varieties with very little track record in our vineyards: the likes of arneis and dolcetto, alongside cool- climate classics such as riesling, gewurztraminer and pinot noir.

Instead of sticking to the tried and tested single varietal path, Pasquale is also exploring co-fermented blends. His flagship white, Alma Mater, combines riesling, pinot gris and gewurztraminer, while there is a chardonnay-viognier in the pipeline.

While blending varieties intrigues him, blending regions and blurring a wine's provenance is something Pasquale is passionately against. "Why is it legal to use 15 per cent of grapes from other regions and still call it single vineyard? How can you transport grapes 1000 kilometres and still name it by its place of origin?" he exclaims with exasperation.

To act as a guarantee that 100 per cent of what's in his bottles is from the place stated on their labels, Pasquale's is one of only two wineries in New Zealand that currently uses the Oritain system. This conducts scientific analysis of each batch to certify the wine's provenance, issuing a certification number that allows consumers to pinpoint the place from which it came.

To keep things local, Pasquale also opened a winery 29km from his original Hakataramea site, among the vineyards he now also owns in the emerging Waitaki Valley. From this have flowed some promising early wines from the Pasquale and sister Kurow Village labels, the fruits of a combination of thought, action and a fair amount of risk.

- © Fairfax NZ News