A five-star pinot noir from New Zealand

2016 Mt Difficulty This is one of the finest wines made in New Zealand and I cannot recommend it highly enough, says Matthew Jukes.

Matthew Jukes
By Matthew Jukes
published

953-wine-2016-Mt-Difficulty

2016 Mt Difficulty, Bannockburn Pinot Noir, Central Otago, New Zealand£25.99, waitrosecellar.com

I released the first ever The Great New Zealand Pinot Noir Classification 15 years ago with my friend, Aussie wine writer Tyson Stelzer. We announced the release of the eighth edition this month and it is published free to view and download on my website for both friends and members.

I came up with the idea for this classification because there was an enormous explosion of wineries making pinot noir in the early noughties and every bottle seemed to be priced around the £25 mark. I thought that this confusing mass of labels needed sorting out, so I devised a rolling, five-year average scoring system that converts the top estates in the country into a one- to five-star table.

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Only 120 estates out of the 512 who make pinot in New Zealand make it onto the classification, so every single winery mentioned is doing a superb job. This enormous body of work is neatly condensed into two pages of A4, which I find rather satisfying!

Mt Difficulty is one of only seven estates to which Tyson and I have awarded five stars and the price of this wine hasn't moved in more than a decade, while its quality has soared. I am thrilled, this week, to alert you to the stunning 2016 vintage, which is available in 123 branches of Waitrose. This is one of the finest wines made in New Zealand and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Matthew Jukes
Matthew Jukes

Matthew Jukes has worked in the UK wine business for well over three decades and during this time has written 14 wine books.  

Matthew regularly lectures, judges, speaks at wine conferences and runs masterclass tastings for both corporate and private clients all over the world. Matthew is also the creator of his ground-breaking initiative, the One Day Wine School, an indulgent day of tasting and learning first performed in 2006.

He has been the MoneyWeek wine correspondent since 2006 and has written a weekly column for the Daily Mail’s Weekend Magazine since 1999. His four highly-acclaimed, annual wine reports – the Burgundy En Primeur Report, the Bordeaux En Primeur Report, the Piemonte Report and the 100 Best Australian Wines – are published on his website, www.matthewjukes.com.

Matthew is one of the world’s leading experts on Australian wine and, with Brisbane-based wine writer Tyson Stelzer, runs an annual competition in Australia to find ‘The Great Australian Red’.  He was made Honorary Australian of the Year in the UK at the 2012 Australia Day Foundation Gala dinner. 

Matthew is a winner of the International Wine and Spirit Competition's Communicator of the Year Trophy.  His thoughts, recommendations and tastings notes are followed very closely by the wine world at large.

 

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