Love’s Labor

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The New York Sun

As the millennium turned, Russell Briggs, a software executive and devoted wine buff living in Los Angeles, decided with his wife that it was time to move away. Far away. They considered Canada and Italy. Then, at a friend’s suggestion, they made the long flight to New Zealand. Walking outdoors between Auckland’s international and domestic air terminals, the couple was seduced by the clarity of the air, the blue of the sky, the white of the clouds, even the brilliant green of the grass.


The couple had planned to investigate the length of New Zealand. But they never got further than Nelson, a lively city on the tip of the South Island, where they bought a beachfront house. Mr. Briggs doesn’t expect to move again. Luckily, America’s loss is also America’s gain. Mr. Briggs has begun sending back to us, under the name Russell Briggs Selections, an eye-opening collection of wines. Even if New Zealand wines have already rung your bells, these wines, I predict, are going to ring them a little louder. And a little purer.


Like my first teenage kiss, I remember the electric feeling of my first sip of New Zealand wine: Cloudy Bay sauvignon blanc. That was back in the early 1980s, and Cloudy Bay put Kiwi wines on the world wine map. With its zingy, tropical-fruited aromas and flavors, sauvignon blanc remains the signature wine of New Zealand. Second place goes to pinot noir, often beguiling, though sometimes simple and jammy. But New Zealand’s dirty little secret is that many of its best bottles, mainly from small artisanal wineries, never leave the home tables.


Russell Briggs means to put New Zealanders in a more sharing frame of mind. From his Nelson base, he noses out “the best of the smallest” wineries on both the North and South Island. Some, like pinot noir maker John Porter, produce as few as 450 cases, and could easily sell out at home. Mr. Briggs uses his considerable charm to convince proprietors to give up a stash for export. Mr. Briggs is currently sending to the United States nearly 3,000 cases of premium wines from around half a dozen producers, along with 3,000 to 5,000 cases of a budget wine. Micro-sourcing of fine wine is no way to get rich. It’s more like an act of love.


I first came across Mr. Briggs, a slender 43-year-old who sports a single earring, at a Manhattan trade and press tasting earlier this month. It was one of those giant events where hundreds of different wines are arrayed on tasting tables, all being slurped, sipped, and spit. So many wines threaten to become a blur on the palate. Yet Mr. Briggs’s selection of a dozen wines stood out for me. Each one spoke individually from the tasting glass. As a group, they showed, more clearly than I’d previously realized, how diverse New Zealand wines can be. The standard-bearing sauvignon blanc and pinot noir were on hand in several variations. But so were wines not so often exported, including chardonnay, a brace of rieslings, gewurztraminer, and what might be the most full-throttle, exhilarating pinot gris I’ve ever tasted.


Tellingly, some big guns of the red wine arsenal did not make it to Mr. Briggs’s tasting table, notably cabernet sauvignon. Queried about this omission, Mr. Briggs pointed out that “New Zealand has had a rap over the years of introducing a green streak in cabs.” That defect, often manifested as a weedy or green pepper character, is the result of grapes that have not fully ripened. It can be masked, said Mr. Briggs, “by winemaking tricks,” but he isn’t about to play them. Besides, he noted that the world is “awash with very good cabernet like those from the 2000 vintage in Bordeaux and all the New World examples.”


Mr. Briggs looks for wines that show “intensity of flavor and that are very fresh with natural acidity, and that do not depend on oaking to beef them up or acid manipulation to zip them up.” He also insists on offering wines made from grapes harvested by hand rather than by machine. “I don’t want any leaves from the vines mixing in with the grapes,” he said. “With machine harvesting, there are other things that go in the hopper that you don’t even want to know about.”


Functioning like a traditional French negociant, Mr. Briggs not only selects finished wines but also offers his own, budget-priced blends of purchased wine labeled as Kiwi White and Kiwi Red. Given its proximity to the Antarctic and its storms, New Zealand has “more vintage variation, not only year to year but region to region,” said Mr. Briggs, “than any other wine growing region of the world.” That means this year’s Kiwi blends may be different from next year’s. Augmenting his higher-end imports, Mr. Briggs is currently bringing 7,000 case of Kiwi White and Red to the United States. The lion’s share of all his wines go to the New York metropolitan region. “New Yorkers,” said Mr. Briggs, “have the most sophisticated wine tastes in the country.”


I mentioned to Mr. Briggs that the best of New Zealand wines seem to have a special clarity of flavor. “Some people say that’s because the ozone layer over us is very thin,” Mr. Briggs said. “They speculate that it changes the phenolics of the wines for the better.” My theory, after gazing at the beauty of New Zealand settings in the movie versions of “Lord of the Rings,” is that it’s not the ozone. It’s the hobbits.


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