As a teenager, I read a story in my hometown newspaper, the Washington Post, which filled me with despair. It was an interview with a visiting French pastry chef who confidently pronounced a terrible fate on America: Never would we be able to create a great croissant in our own land. Our flour, our butter, and even our ovens were incapable of producing anything more than a pale imitation of the real thing. That turned out to be balderdash. Our croissants became every bit as good as the originals.

Once there were also hard-line Frenchmen from Burgundy who, with the same overweaning confidence of that pastry chef, would have pronounced their wines to be the one true expression of pinot noir and chardonnay. I’ll concede that it’s been harder to get these two grapes to achieve Burgundian character in America than it was to make a ringer of a Parisian croissant. One of the top contenders, currently, for Burgundian honors is highly unlikely and remote terroir: Central Otago, a relatively dry and quite cool region near the south end of New Zealand’s South Island. Along with its exciting scenery, Central Otago has also become, in less than a decade, the source for exciting wines, none more so than those of a winery called Felton Road.

Earlier this month, I sampled an array of Felton Road rieslings, chardonnays, and pinot noirs over lunch at Aureole with Nigel Greening, owner of the winery. All the wines shared great aromatics and purity of flavor. In theory, its Central Otago’s soils and cool, dry climate – the only one in New Zealand that is continental rather than maritime – that give these wines their special character. But there must be an X-factor at work as well, not only here but throughout New Zealand. Some say that it’s the thinness of the ozone level over the country, which seems to infuse the landscape with a particular clarity of light and perhaps also imparts a parallel purity of flavor to the wines.

My introduction to New Zealand pinot noir, very much the wine of the moment, came in 2001 at a tasting of more than 30 examples at an Auckland wine fair. I was charmed by their fruit-jam flavors (the French term confiture sounds better) and supple texture – but only up to a point. Tasting those wines got to be like eating too many sweets. I found myself missing some kind of flavor complication, maybe a touch of earthiness and more bones for structure rather than just flesh. The blond-tressed Mr. Greening, who looks like the rock guitarist he once was, understood my problem. “The danger in New Zealand in all varietals,” he said, “is too much fruit expression. We have to fight the fruit.”

The 2002 and 2003 pinot noirs we sampled had not abandoned that signature fruitiness. But it had been sublimated into wines that were deeper, firmer, subtler, and sexier than what I remembered. They had what Felton Road’s winemaker Blair Walter calls “pinocity.” It’s an easier quality to taste than to describe, but it has much to do with silkiness and a certain tang to the fruit. Mr. Greening described the 2002 pinot noir as an “American” vintage, while the 2003 was “English” in style. That is, the 2002 was “big” while the currently available 2003 ($47.95) was more restrained. Both wines evoked for me the style of the best wines from Morey-Saint-Denis in the heart of the Cote d’Or, a style that is neither the most delicate nor the most commanding of red Burgundies. It’s more about equilibrium.

Of the 1999 and 2003 rieslings poured by Mr. Greening, the younger wine was crisper and more mouth-watering. “We used to wait for the grapes to be completely ripe before picking,” he said, “but we weren’t quite satisfied. Some of their crisp lime flavor was lost. Then Blair took a cue from Dr. Loosen [Ernst Loosen, a top Riesling vintner in Germany] and now he picks them off earlier to preserve that freshness.” The Dry Riesling 2003 ($26.95) was a fine wine, and its alcohol was reasonably low at 11%, but not even Central Otago, in my book, can yet run with the elite rieslings of Germany, which are unrivaled in their uncanny ability to pump out flavor with a minimum of alcohol.

Kiwi chardonnay is supposed to be at its best in the comparatively warm North Island regions of Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay. So I was startled to sample two Felton Road chardonnays which, despite their cool origins, were racy without being “green,” full-bodied without bloat, and firm yet pliant in the mouth. It wasn’t always that way, according to Mr. Greening. That old bugaboo, “too much fruit expressivity,” was the problem, so much so that he called one earlier chardonnay “crack cocaine in a bottle.” To make changes, “we looked to the viticulture, not to the winemaking,” said Mr. Greening. That included the planting of cover crops which took away some nourishment from the vines, bringing more concentration to the chardonnay. The new, tauter regime showed in the 2002 ($29.95) bottling we sipped, from which lean flavor flowed.

Last Sunday morning, before the heat became more oppressive than it already was, I opened a bottle of Felton Road’s top-of-the-line “Block 5” Pinot Noir 2002 ($62.95 at Sherry-Lehmann), from a “sweet spot” in the property’s original vineyard planted in the early 1990s. It was a seductive, raspberry-inflected wine, gentle yet persistent, and a bit more saturated with flavor that the regular bottling. Even hardcore Burgundians, I felt, would have to give a nod to such a wine (and to our croissants!). When I mentioned this to Mr. Greening, he told me that, at a recent wine gathering in Burgundy, he’d been introduced to a group of the region’s best “new wave” winemakers. “I’d was afraid that I might get blank looks, but they all said ‘Oh yes, we know Felton Road.’ They had all tasted the wines. They were open and welcoming to me. It’s such a joy to find out that the Old World loves what the New World is doing.”

Purchasing Felton Road Wines

Felton Road wines are in high demand, and according to the Web site (www.feltonroad.com), several current releases are sold out at the winery. Locally, the most reliable source for the wines is Sherry-Lehmann, where it can’t hurt that the head buyer, Ken Medford, is a Kiwi. Pinot Noir 2003, Block 5 Pinot Noir 2002, Chardonnay 2002, and Dry Riesling 2003 are currently available. Felton Road selections are on the wine lists of BLT Steak (106 E. 57th St., 212-752-7470) and Bouley (120 W. Broadway, 212-964-2525).