It’s been three years in the making but the sun has finally decided to shine in New Zealand’s normally wet and windy capital Wellington. Oh, and it’s Pinot2013.
New Zealand is a small wine producer – it’s the world’s 17th largest wine producer – after Serbia of all places, and I can’t say I’ve been to many Serbian wine conferences. Smaller still, Pinot Noir represents just one-tenth of New Zealand’s production, and Sam Neill, of Alcatraz and Jurassic Park fame turned Central Otago winery owner put that into perspective. “We are here for 0.10176 of the world’s wine,” he noted. Yet, the wine world’s glitterati including Lisa Perrotti-Brown MW, Jeannie Cho Lee MW and Matt Kramer have turned up so it must be a worthy 0.10176.
Matt Kramer kicked things off with a cracking keynote speech entitled ‘Can Atheists Create Great Pinot Noir?’ I can’t say any more – you’ll have to wait to read all about it on wine-searcher.com’s news tomorrow.
Sam Neill followed that up with a comedy speech, scoring Kramer a harsh 84/100. Now he knows what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a sub-90 Wine Spectator score!
Having been told his job was to entertain us, Neill certainly did that, despite modestly claiming he was no entertainer. “Good God, have you seen any of my films? I don’t do entertaining. I am the sort of chap that gets cast as someone who’ll cheerfully cut off a woman’s finger with a blunt axe just to make a point. I’ve just finished working for the BBC – I was playing a psychotic cop from Belfast who tortures people for information. I’m not an entertainer!”
Nevertheless that didn’t stop him from giving us a comprehensive overview of how to use the word bastard, and there can’t be many times that has happened at a keynote speech at a wine conference. Apparently it can be used as a term of endearment in Australasia – although that’s news to me. Perhaps I have led a sheltered life. For example, “Jasper Morris, what a funny bastard he is,” said Neill. “Tim Atkin – what an excellent bastard he is,” he added.
But it turned out all this blaspheming was leading up to a point. “Vis-a-vis Burgundy, I see us as the bastards of Pinot Noir. As in good bastards as well as in the literal sense we are the bastards of Pinot Noir…We are the bastards of Pinot cos we are unwanted and unacknowledged.
“And like the best bastards anywhere, we don’t care. We take what we want from the old culture [Europe] and we discard what we see as obsolete and we are free to innovate. It’s good to be bastards. And it’s even better to be good bastards.”
So I’m surrounded by bastards. Good bastards it seems. All 0.10176 of them.
