In conversation with ‘Wine of the Year’ winner Isabel Estate

Marlborough vineyard Isabel Estate has always been a standout on the local and global wine stage, and this year their Wild Barrique Chardonnay 2022 was crowned Wine of the Year at the prestigious London Wine Competition!

We chatted with Isabel Estate’s Chief Winemaker, Jeremy McKenzie, on what makes this vintage, vineyard and region so special.

Jeremy McKenzie, Chief Winemaker

Huge congrats on winning ‘Wine of the Year’ in the London Wine Competition! Amazing that it was the first time Isabel Estate had entered and it stole the show! What do you think gave this 2022 Chardonnay the winning edge?

The Isabel Estate Wild Barrique has been doing really well since we started making it in 2016. The style and profile has a new and old world twist. It has lovely minerality and complexity, and still has that nice energy that we seem to get with top single vineyard New Zealand Chardonnays that are well made and complex too.

It’s a really lovely drinking wine, and everyone at shows or tastings just loves it; they’re blown away. Our site throws interesting characters into it every year; the fruit and the vine quality is top tier, and well, if I couldn’t make something decent out of it we wouldn’t still be here!

I’m not a habitual Chardonnay drinker; it takes a lot for me to like a Chardonnay and I really did love this! I think that complexity and minerality made it really interesting.

We do hear that a lot, and it has a really nice salinity on the palate that really makes it sing. It’s got a lovely creaminess but it still finishes quite light on its feet. And it’s great with food!

Speaking of food, what would you recommend pairing the Wild Barrique with?

We've got an oak barrel smoker here at Isabel Estate, so we're often drinking it with Manuka smoked salmon or kingfish that we've caught ourselves out in the Sounds, and we love treating people to that. It’s great with oysters as well, or seared scallops.

Isabel Estate is celebrating its 30th vintage this year! Could you give us a rundown of the Estate’s journey over the years?

The vines themselves were established in 1980, so this land and vineyard have been a part of the fabric of Marlborough for a very long time now, and the brand has grown into a true global brand. In the first 10 years while the vineyard was still getting set up, a lot of the fruit was sold to other top-notch wineries. Then the label was launched by a very passionate team, and the winery was opened here by Sir Edmund Hillary. We have grown a strong presence in the UK over the past 30 years, along with Australia, the US, Japan, China and here domestically too. That passion and expertise from the start has carried through to where we are today.

We have been on a lot of wine lists in Michelin Star restaurants in London and New York, and we have a lot of strong affiliations and ‘clout’ in those markets, even though we fly a bit more under the radar here. Our Chardonnay in particular is so well loved by our NZ and Australian distributors, and they sell out of their allocations every year. We’ve had success with a lot of the premium airlines globally too.

You get a lot of value and quality in the bottle for what you pay for an Isabel Estate wine, and I think that has served us very well over the years.

I hear you can host people at the Estate to experience the wine on site, too?

We can do tastings and long meals on appointment in a very intimate setting. Often, we’ll have international visitors who have been travelling a lot and have had their fair share of restaurants, so they love the more casual offering and locally sourced cuisine that we have often caught ourselves, then we have a chef prepare it for our guests.

So a lot of focus on provenance!

Yes; to that provenance story, we’re single vineyard, fully estate grown and bottled, and that definitely comes through in our wines. When I’m out on the road, I’m not just speaking about the brand, I’m speaking about our adventure sports and hunter-gatherer culture and tourism and the outdoors, and people around the world really engage with that. It’s all part of the Isabel Estate story.

I do think Marlborough’s best-kept secret is Chardonnay. So many top Chardonnays are made in this region; super age-worthy, occasion wines that invoke great feelings and really connect with people who love wine and love food.

Isabel Estate also has a slightly cooler microclimate within the Wairau Valley, so the ripening can be a slightly longer process. It’s a unique site with heavier clay than our surroundings, and then we’re planting and farming everything organically with a big focus on sustainability. There are a lot of reasons our wines end up so interesting and unique.

Isabel Estate really does ‘walk the talk’ with sustainability. Could you talk us through your practices?

We take a very holistic view, not just with how we farm but how we care for the land, our people (with responsible labour certifications) and the wider community, where we have native planting projects.

20 hectares of the vineyard is BioGro organic certified too, and we take a circular approach wherever we can; all our waste and winemaking byproduct is composted, and we produce over 60kW of solar power. We’ve got Awatere Merinos grazing through the vineyard at the moment, and we carefully monitor our water usage. All Isabel Estate wines are vegan, which has become a big talking point amongst our customers. We are also part of Appellation Marlborough Wine, which is working really well for us. Because our wines are fully grown, made, bottled and stored on site, we keep our carbon footprint small too. We do smaller, limited allocations each year, but that’s why we almost always sell out.

Those smaller vintages are part of the magic of Isabel Estate; we get to share a more unique, but great value wine with friends over dinner!

Absolutely – that’s why the restaurants are loving it as well. It’s a bit more special, and we’ve made a bespoke textured cotton label that presents it beautifully too. These restaurants are enjoying our trophy-winning wines that regularly get great reviews.

So, if readers can’t track down a bottle of the Wild Barrique 2022 that won Wine of the Year, what do you recommend they try from Isabel Estate instead?

The Isabel Estate Chardonnay 2023 really is a fantastic wine. It has lovely complexity; it’s just made from a couple more clones from around the vineyard, whereas the Wild Barrique is just a single Mendoza. Each vintage of our Estate Chardonnay is fantastic; we really do have an icon site for Chardonnay. We benchmark every year; we make sure we’re really on point with style, and a lot of work goes into the process from the fruit to barrel selection to the final blend – no stone left unturned! Us having 100% control because everything is done onsite is crucial too.

Thank you to Jeremy for your time and insights!

Find Isabel Estate’s award-winning wines at select liquor stores, including EuroVintage. The Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Gris can be found at Woolworths nationwide.

https://www.isabelestate.co.nz/