That’s certainly not the case with NZ wines. Nobody waits – Felton Road sells out their entire stock of Pinot Noirs four months after release. So within fourteen months of harvest, the stuff is all sold and probably 80% drunk. They will never know what a wine it could have become – more’s the pity. But what can you do when there is so much demand.
We complained about this to the people who ran the B&B we were staying at and they told us about an American who tried to make a NZ pinot noir that would take 10 years of bottle ageing. They had just gone bust or were about to - so we drove to the nearest town and bought up all the stock the little wineshop there had.
