not serious wine chats the not serious wine drinkers

Aidan Raftery hasn’t had formal training in winemaking but it seems wine has always featured somehow in some way in his life, a life that now happens to be making the stuff in a village somewhere in the Republic of Georgia. Born in the UK, he arrived in Aotearoa with his family as a young chap. Serendipity would have it that the family home was perched just around the corner from some wine writer, Master of Wine guy called Bob Campbell. With a curiosity of industrial proportions, Ai...

You might think I’ve taken a departure from the wine chats by not talking to a winemaker for today’s chat. Quite the contrary. For most of us, the restaurant setting is where we get our best exposure to wines we may not have heard of or tried before. The beverage selection is an important income earner for any hospitality joint and the restaurant is an important customer for our beverage producing pals. With such genuine simpatico it seems only right that we include those hard-...

One Tuesday morning in Tāmaki Makaurau mid August, Pete, John and I had the chance to sit down at the table at Coco’s Sound Lounge and chew the fat with Rosie Finn of Neudorf Vineyards — and she can chat. Rosie almost broke Matt Dicey’s record of such adept conversational flow that next to no editing was required. Dreamy! Matt still holds the record but Rosie was hot on his heels with only two short excerpts ending up on the cutting room floor. It was a total treat to chat to this f...

On a Sunday afternoon on Auckland’s aromatic Karangahape Road, we welcomed winemaker, Nick Mills from Rippon to the newly christened Coco’s Sound Lounge. In town, for the annual Negociants New Zealand Fine Wine Tour, we were grateful that Nick could squeeze us in for a little not serious chat and a laugh or two. This one is for the winos but it’s also for the ski hounds and the musos. I don’t use the term Original Gangster that often but in the case of Nick Mills and his family they are...

Coordinating a time to record a chat with winemaker Dave Mackintosh in Auckland isn’t so hard. He’s something of a flying winemaker, dividing his time between the Big Smoke where his wife, Caitlin and their kids live, and Hawkes Bay where he makes wine under his newly established Kenzie brand. The Mackintosh clan returned home to Aotearoa after a solid fifteen years in Australia. If you’ve spent 10 minutes in a wine bar in Melbourne you may have crossed paths with Arfion, a wine made by ...

Warning: this chat contains sulphur. Listen, we’re almost done talking about natural wine. It’s been the most debated movement in the modern wine world since screw caps filled the gap where a cork should go. It’s contentious partly because it doesn’t adhere to a specific set of rules for certification and there are such different definitions of what ‘natural’ actually means. It’s possibly also a tad divisive because it made a lot of established wineries feel like they were out of to...