Jane´s Hunter Pinot Noir

I tasted this wine one week ago, at a dinner in Langan´s Brasserie (Straton Street, London UK). And I was lucky because I tasted both, the red and the white one...Great!


If New Zealand wines can be summed up as elegant, feisty, zestful, generous and top quality, then Jane Hunter is a wonderful ambassador for her adopted country, mirroring all these qualities and making wines to match. Yet she nearly did not go into viticulture at all, having specialised in animal husbandry at university in Australia. Her practical work found her in the middle of nowhere in south-west Australia and she realised that this was not the life for her, and switched to viticulture in her final year. “ I didn’t drink wine until I was 23 or 24; all the other students were a rather raucous lot. My interest is growing grapes but I think I have got a commercial palate and I can pick out what customers will like,” she explains modestly. These skills are what have made Hunter’s Wines one of her adopted country’s most successful wineries, putting it on a world stage, winning countless medals and awards. A relative newcomer in wine-making terms, New Zealand has come to be regarded as among the best for what it does well. Although some Kiwi vineyards are owned by big multinational corporations, many more fit the boutique winery category, small or medium-sized, and these are, in the main, the ones that have put New Zealand on the world wine map, none more so than Hunter’s Wines.

Jane and her late husband Ernie planted their first vines in the Wairau Valley on South Island in 1979. They won their first awards in 1986 at the Sunday Times Wine Festival – the first time a New Zealand wine had won anything, she recalls, where it was wine of the show. Since then the international prizes, trophies and accolades have just kept coming. Only a few years after making their debut wines, Ernie was tragically killed in a motor accident and from 1987 Jane became owner, viticulturist and managing director of Hunter’s Wines. Never in any doubt that she would carry on developing the vineyard and new wines, she says its success is due to the work of her team, which includes wine consultant Tony Jordan and chief wine maker Gary Duke.