Massey Magazine November 2001 |

winemaker
Name: Phyll Pattie
Qualification: BTech (Food)

winemaker
Name: Oliver Masters
Qualification: BTech Hons (Biotech)

In June 2001 Phyll Pattie, co-owner and working director of Ata Rangi, learned that the Martinborough vineyard had taken the prestigious Bouchard-Finlayson Trophy for Champion Pinot Noir at the 31st International Wine and Spirit Competition in London. Again. Ata Rangi’s pinot noir had won the trophy – one of the most coveted in the industry – twice before, in 1995 and 1996.

The official comment from the judging panel: “The fine concentrated nose of the winner, combined with layers of fruit and excellent structure, was worthy of the trophy. A beautifully balanced, seductive wine.”

But if you fancy being seduced by a drop of Ata Rangi’s prize winning pinot – the 1999 is sold out – you will need to go to some extra effort. No mass distribution supermarket wine this. “It’s all sold on allocation,” says Pattie. “We sell it to our distributors, they will ring up their fine wine retailers, and they will ring up their ten favourite pinot noir lovers. It hardly hits the shelves.”

Pinot noir – a wine with its origins in Burgundy – is the winemakers’ wine. “Of all the wines I have worked with, it’s the one that can have a winemaker’s signature. It’s quite malleable,” says Pattie. “Something like cabernet really makes itself, it has such a distinctive flavour it’s harder to push it around. Pinot noir is much more subtle: it needs much more gentle handling and a lot of understanding. Pinot noir is said to be heart and soul; a very sensual type of wine.”

New Zealand, and even more so Martinborough, is blessed with just the climate and soils to grow this notoriously pernickety grape. “If the climate is too hot the fruit becomes overcooked and the wine too alcoholic. If the climate is too cool, you get the green end of the spectrum,” says Pattie. Ata Rangi vineyards enjoy warm days coupled with cool nights: a combination that, given dry weather over autumn, allows the fruit to be left on the vine for a long time. “Ripening very, very gently,” says Pattie.

Few growing regions offer these conditions. Burgundy still produces the pre-eminent pinot noir, according to Pattie (though there is also a great deal of very ordinary, disappointing red burgundy on the market), while the new world producers in California, Oregon, Victoria and New Zealand vie for second place.

Pinot noir should not fruit heavily. Again, Ata Rangi enjoys a natural advantage. Here the vineyards occupy lean, free-draining soils, windy in spring, and quite cool, says Pattie. “So we rarely get three tonnes to the acre, whereas other people have to thin back to achieve quality and concentration.”

The conditions also favour a clean, green approach. “We have low disease pressure because it’s so dry and so windy. We can manage the vineyards with just organic sprays. We’ve never ever sprayed insecticides. Herbicides are harder, but we manage with under-vine weeding in dry seasons.”

Ata Rangi is the fifth New Zealand winery to achieve ISO14001, an environmental management standard.“Palliser, Martinborough Vineyard, Vidals, CJ Pask, and now Ata Rangi have led the world in gaining ISO14001 for vineyards and wineries,” says Pattie.

If Ata Rangi’s place among the élite of the pinot noir world now seems assured, it was not always so. Ata Rangi’s first plantings went in in 1980. “It was absolutely bones of bum for those first ten years for Clive [the vineyard’s founder],” says Pattie. “He didn’t have enough money to buy the barrels in 1985 [for the first vintage], so he started a barrel share scheme, where if you put up $50 you got three bottles of Pinot Noir every year for three years. I guess there were about 100 or 150 people, and that was really the start of the mail order. The people invested 50 bucks in an ex-dairy farmer with a few barrels in his garage in a place no one had ever heard of, but it was a risk that paid off.”

When Pattie herself graduated from Massey with a BTech (Food) in 1976 it was by no means certain that the wine industry would be her future, though she does remember enjoying the courses run by Malcolm Reeves [now of CrossRoads winery], “and he was already very passionate about wine”.

After she graduated, the prospect of travel beckoned. For two years she worked in the dairy industry, diligently saving for what would be two years’ OE, six months of it spent in the north of Italy. “It was in a little ski village and I just fell in love with the wine and food culture. So when I came back – faced with the grim prospect of ‘settling down’ – I knocked on a few winery doors.” One of those doors belonged to Montana winemaker and fellow Food Tech alumnus Peter Hubscher. In 1980 she was appointed cellarmaster of Montana Wines in Tamaki and in 1984 she became winemaker at Montana Marlborough Winery.

In 1987 she joined Clive Paton at Ata Rangi. Clive’s sister, who was also working for Ata Rangi, would later marry Oliver Masters, who is Ata Rangi’s technical manager and an accomplished winemaker. (Oliver is another Massey alumnus, with a BTech Hons (Biotech) 1989, and is a veteran of vintages in Martinborough, Burgundy and Hawke’s Bay. “A bloody good winemaker,” says Pattie approvingly.) And in 1995 the four of them pooled resources to become a company. Within a week of its formation came the news of the first Bouchard-Finlayson Trophy win. “It blew us away,” says Pattie. “It seemed like such a good omen. It really put us firmly on the international wine map. Then we won it again the next year, which further reinforced our strong position.”

Her forecast for the New Zealand wine industry? “We have to focus on premium quality. We are a boutique wine producing country,” says Pattie. The keys will be quality, smart marketing, and the intelligent matching of production techniques to particular price points in the market.”

The International Wine and Spirit Competition is one of two major London-based international wine shows. The other is the International Wine Challenge at which Villa Maria won Best Sauvignon Blanc and Best Value White Wine.