Drink
Music making
by Keith Stewart
I call it the Kiri Te Kanawa problem: you are presented with something that you expect to be fabulous, and yet, as a critic, you want it to be, well, not bad exactly, but not quite up to the mark, so that you can use your allotted column centimetres on something new and different. The problem is that Kiri is invariably fabulous, and you end up happy, but just a bit concerned that there is a continuity about your work that may be construed as a little less than cutting-edge.
For me, it happens every time a bottle of Neudorf wine arrives, because I know that there is a harmony between my molecules and those of Neudorf, and I have to try extremely hard to put the molecular vibrations aside and concentrate on the critical stuff. Imagine I am in my lab coat, focused on colour, bouquet, flavour and feel, balance and structure, being as empirical as possible. Problem is, trying to be a good critic just puts me back at square one, my senses confronted unequivocally with the reasons that I think Neudorf wine is so good.
And the reason is … ! Well, it has a lot to do with Kiri Te Kanawa, a quality about her singing that music critics like to call “creamy”. That is an adjective that would work for Neudorf in most cases, for it implies a gracious sort of richness, but there is something else, too, about both Kiri and Neudorf that defies a single adjective. As well as richness, there is excitement, a thrill that holds your interest, a quality that is part purity, part intellect and totally animal – it makes you feel good.
So when 2003 Home Block Pinot Noir turned up, I gave it a serious tasting, and it just kept coming back for more. As I did. Tasted it, drank the bottle with dinner. Never changed my mind once. Even if my molecules had not been aroused, I would have been mightily impressed. They were, and I was.
TRY THIS
Neudorf 2003 Home Block Pinot Noir
Fabulous. You can tell from the first nose-full that this is a wine with richness and poise, the very two things that pinot noir aspires to and rarely achieves. Aromatic, flecked with fresh fruit and wrapped in a sexy feral reek in the way that single malt has a “peat reek”, it is long and lithe, with wonderful depth of flavour as well as a silky, gruff-edged feel. The best red yet from Neudorf, and that is a serious claim, but I am picking that this will go down as one of those seminal wines that old codgers remember late in the 21st century.
PRICE: $56
AVAILABLE: extremely rare.
