A handful of New Zealand wine lovers will soon be able to buy wine from a Kiwi-owned parcel of Gevrey-Chambertin.
Domaine Thomson (formerly known as Surveyor Thomson) managed a rare feat for an outsider – buying a vineyard in Burgundy’s Cotede Nuits (pictured).
David Hall-Jones, an Invercargill lad, and his Singaporean wife, PM, have lived in Hong Kong for the past 25 years, working in law and banking respectively. But they have a long-held passion for wine.
PM acquired her love of wine from her father. “We had wine tastings when I was a kid. He introduced me to Nuits-Saints-Georges when I was 15,” she says.
David’s taste for fine wine didn’t come quite so early – brought up in Invercargill, the arse end of New Zealand, Nuits-Saint-Georges wasn’t exactly easy to get hold of in the local bottle shop. But close friends including Mark Robertson and Kim Crawford, who would later sell his eponymous brand to drinks giant Constellation, says David, persuaded him to get involved in Central Otago’s burgeoning wine industry. “They said: Dave, you are a guy that should own a vineyard from Otago because you are from the south yourself.”
With the help of Central pioneers, Robin Dicey and the late Rolfe Mills, David and PM found their place and planted a vineyard in the Lowburn sub-region.
PM explains their decision: “We decided to buy this land because we wanted to make Pinot Noir in NZ and we could not afford to buy a Burgundy vineyard. It’s on the same latitude as Burgundy with a continental climate,” she says.
At the same time, they’d purchased a derelict house in the famous winegrowing village of Gevrey-Chambertin. “We bought the house in Burgundy as a ruin. It had not been lived in since World War II and had no gas, no electricity, no nothing. So we did up the house in a historic way.”
Buying a vineyard in New Zealand and a do-up 19,000km away, plus working corporate jobs would be more than enough work for most people but the couple also had a 5 month old and a 6 year-old at the time. Somehow they muddled through.
Fast forward to 2013, and a Gevrey local passed away, leaving behind a parcel of vines that the inheritor did not want. The pair was offered the opportunity to buy it. “We were happy that they thought of us as from the village because we had spent 11 years there,” says PM.
It is a small part of a vineyard – only an acre. The parcel is managed and vinified by local vigneron Gerard Quivy under the ‘metayer’ system: he will do all the work and gets to keep two-thirds of the finished wine; the owners, David and PM, are paid rent in wine.
It’s on a slope in a lieux dit called the “Evocelles”. It’s classified as a village wine but is surrounded by premier cru sites.
There will be around 300 cases a year and that’s going to be predominantly for the NZ market but there will also be a smidgen of wine in HK, Singapore and the UK – through their distributors Berry Bros & Rudd.
If you want to find out more about it, you can visit their website or, if you’re based in London, the pair will be in Brixton this weekend pouring their wine at the New Zealand Cellar store. Go and say hello, they are great value.
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