Pinot Gris

TASTING PANEL JUDGES AND RATING SYSTEM

Yvonne Lorkin

dish drinks writer and experienced beer, wine and cider judge

Cameron Douglas

Master sommelier and lecturer at AUT

Jo Gear

Winemaker NZ Wine Society

Gold Medal

Superb. Strongly recommended.

Silver Medal

A cut above the rest in quality.

Bronze Medal

A good-quality crowd pleaser.

(NB: All wines are judged blind under competition conditions. The scores of judges for their own wines cannot exceed those of other judges.)

Up until our most recent pinot gris panel (held in 2016), it looked as though pinot gris would prove an unstoppable force. Kiwis were grabbing the grape with gusto and our wine producers were crushing a whopping 25,000 tonnes of the stuff. That was over 1500 times what they were processing a decade before. It came close to reaching nine per cent of our total grape crush (sauvignon blanc accounts for 76 per cent). Then suddenly the trend reversed and in just a few short years, pinot gris production dropped by 4000 tonnes and four percentage points. It’s still the fourth, we felt the time was right to take a snapshot of how they were looking quality and style-wise.