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It is time to the record straight on New Zealand wines.
First, genius kiwi winemaker and screw cap revolutionary Kim Crawford is a guy. A very hip guy, well over 6 feet, with long, slick hanks of black hair. When he hosted a wine tasting in San Francisco's W hotel, he wore a dark suit coat, blue Hawaiian shirt and hipster glasses like one of the masked cartoon heroes in The Incredibles.
That doesn't mean he is aggressively macho, although his name is now a mega brand and his sauvignon blanc was named 2005 national champ. Crawford and wife Erica, the marketing brains of the winery, produced a pink wine, Pansy, for gay supporters in Auckland that's now gone worldwide.
New Zealand has female vintners too, including Kathy Lynskey, the proud, rangy and sun-burnished daughter of a sheep rancher who now runs an acclaimed boutique winery in stony Marlborough, which makes only 4,000 cases a year.
Both will correct you on a larger misconception about New Zealand wines. There's much more on their islands than its famous sauvignon blanc.
In the last 25 years, New Zealanders wrote a new chapter in sauvignon blanc, creating a bracing version with grapefruity crispness and bright aromas of meadows and citrus.
The fancy wine term for the flavor is gooseberry, a New Zealand bush with berries that are tart and herbal. The rest of us more easily recognize the namesake kiwi fruit or lemongrass, appropriately Pacific rim, too. To protect these delicate and unusual aromas, the Crawfords switched from corks to the once ignoble screw cap.
Hold on. Sauvignon blanc is old news, and Kim Crawford was such a success that the company was bought by Canada's Vincor.
Now Kiwi winemakers are earning New Zealand a place on the short list of the few good spots in the world to make pinot noir.
In the wings are more aromatic whites, the German rieslings, gewurztraminer and even more, each remade bright, juicy clean and bursting with aroma and ripe perfumes, from subtle pear to melon and tropical fruit.
The reasons, as with most wine, are territorial and speak to New Zealand's distinct character, geographic and human. If Australia, which lies in warmer latitudes to the north and west, was the California of the old British Empire, New Zealand is its Pacific Northwest, smaller, cooler, rugged, outdoorsy.
If you saw only one Lord of the Rings movie, you know all of Middle-earth from the Shire to Isengard and the Misty Mountains can be found in the lush and rocky topography of New Zealand.
If New Zealanders aren't quite the good-time, good-value blokes or such big producers as the Aussies, they are self-reliant, inventive and egalitarian, which gives their young industry a bit of green-clean purity, experimentation and pluck.
The geography of wine breaks down simplistically between the two islands. The North Island, which includes Hawke's Bay, is warmer and grows the most chardonnay and Bordeaux reds such as merlot and cabernet sauvignon.
The greatest chunk of wine production and reputation comes from the cooler South Island. On the north end is Marlborough, home to the sauvignon blanc renaissance first made famous by Cloudy Bay and others.
"We take our hats off to Cloudy Bay, they're an iconic brand," Lynskey says.
Crawford, who lives near Auckland on the North Island, sources grapes throughout his country and says the dry riesling he makes on the South Island may be his best. He relies on the coolness to produce crisp ripe German varietals, in the not so sweet style of Alsace. The tough, stony soils in many places replicate the hillsides of the Rhine and Mosel and give mineral freshness like wet rocks and mountain streams.
And Crawford's big expansion in pinot noir now depends heavily on grapes from Otago on the southern end of the South Alps, the highest and coolest vineyards, the most southerly in the world.
Lynskey's great white wine hope is not riesling but gewurztraminer, which plays second even in Germany. Her dream red is merlot, a warm-weather grape few try on the South Island, but is her most expensive wine.
Even for New Zealand it's risky, but Lynskey shows little hesitation.
"No one else wants to grow it here, but I happen to like to drink the stuff."
-- Chris Sherman, who writes about food and wine for the St. Petersburg Times, is the author of "The Buzz on Wine" Lebhar-Friedman Books, $16.95. He can be reached at (727) 893-8585 or sherman@sptimes.com