A Pair at Dinner

Whilst we eat cheese and chat the Delta Marlborough Riesling 2005.

Deep lime gold. 13% and aged for four months on lees prior to bottling. The texture is quite rich and reminiscent of natural yogurt, lime and honey. I like the weight of the wine and it is aging gracefully as Riesling should.

Try as I might I can't find any reference to this wine apart from the fact it won a silver in the Air New Zealand show and I suspect it is made for the wine club to which my father belongs.

The wine served with my Dad's lovely cooking was the Mills Reef Reserve Hawke's Bay Pinot Noir 2006. This wine presented something of an anomaly as Pinot Noir from the Hawke's Bay tends to do.

Deep Garnet red fading to brick at the rim. Damson Plum, tinned rasberry, spice and ink on the nose preceed a juicy purple wine gum character on the palate supported by a cuddly, cushy texture. All this wrapped in taut acid. The acid aside I would have believed I was drinking a Grenache of the label didn't so clearly state otherwise.

I believe that this will be the last vintage Mills Reef make of the Pinot Noir and that may be for the best. I love to drink Pinot Noir and there's no reason why it shouldn't work in certain sites in the Hawke's Bay. Chardonnay and Pinot Noir are planted in close proximaty in Burgundy but, apart from a couple of examples grown in the limestone hills behind the Bay, this delicate red grape doesn't seem to produce at its best in this part of the country. The Mills Reef Pinot provides a good arguement for typicity.

TypicityWikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This SourceTypicity is a term in wine tasting used to describe the degree to which a wine reflects its origins, and thus demonstrates the signature characteristics of the area where it was produced, its mode of production, or its parent grape, e.g. how much a merlot wine “tastes like a merlot”. It is used analogously for other foodstuffs, such as meat and dairy products.
Typicity derives from both historical precedent and a modern consensus on how a certain wine should “taste”. It is a straightforward concept but has controversial ramifications. For example, whether or not a particular area produces wines with typicity can be debatable, and especially controversial are the factors that may give rise to such typicity. The factors probably involve vineyard bedrock, soils and climate, together with the local viticultural and winemaking traditions, but their relative importance will vary and can be much argued. The extent to which such factors are encompassed by the term terroir is an especially charged issue. However, none of this detracts from the value of the term typicity as a starting point for discussion.
In some countries, such as Austria, typicity is used as part of a qualitative hierarchy that takes into consideration soil, climate and vintage. Austrian Qualitatswein (literally "quality wine") is tested for typicity, with the classification printed on the wine label. This can be considered a subjective and unreliable way to classify wine, opening the door to elitism with what has been criticized by some as viticultural racism.
French typicité, Italian tipicità