Winemaker Larry McKenna may have resigned from one of the country’s great Pinot Noir wineries, but he’s not walking away from wine just yet, says Joelle Thomson...

The prince of Pinot has retired, ending an era for both Martinborough and for New Zealand’s hero red grape variety, Pinot Noir.

Larry McKenna has spent the past 37 years forging a reputation as one of New Zealand’s greatest Pinot Noir winemakers. His first pivotal career move was to Martinborough Vineyards where he became winemaker and a 20% shareholder in 1995-1996, creating wines that were distinctly different to others in this fledgling region’s early wine days.

Whole bunch fermentation, wild yeast ferments and skin maceration were all techniques that he learnt in Burgundy, the traditional home of Pinot Noir, but which he refined over many controversial years of introducing them to the small world of Kiwi Pinot Noir in its early days. From the start, he made wines that were distinctly different, inspired by the ground-breaking Canterbury Pinot Noirs from Danny Schuster’s early days at St Helena. The pair have always resonated when it comes to wine and food, which makes sense when comparing and contrasting Pinot Noirs from these two regions in New Zealand. They are the two most similar regions in terms of climate and the styles of wine produced in each place.

And yet, for all the generosity in taste, tannins and tautness in the Pinot Noirs that McKenna has made over the years in Martinborough, the local village was pretty barren when he first arrived. Two takeaways and two pubs were all equally unappealing, but the region’s dry, drought-ridden climate, hot summers and cold winters all reminded him of his home in South Australia. “Both are slightly different, but have the classic climatic features of great wine regions,” says McKenna.

It helped that the founders of Martinborough Vineyards, the Milne brothers, offered him a role as a shareholder as well as winemaker when they invited him to join them in their early days.

“They were Derek, a soil scientist with the DSIR, and his younger brother Duncan, who was a dynamic person and ran the business,” recalls McKenna. “Both were strongly influenced by St Helena and Danny Schuster in Canterbury and I would credit Derek as the one who recognised that the Martinborough district could be good for Pinot Noir.”

He says that they all wanted Pinot Noir to be their hero grape variety, so it was given “every priority and was highly successful from the start”.
McKenna resigned from Martinborough Vineyards in 1999 to found Escarpment Vineyard, nine kilometres east of Martinborough village. Twenty years later he sold it to Torbreck in South Australia, because his partners at Escarpment needed their funds back. It can’t have been easy, but McKenna remained circumspect and stayed on as general manager to oversee the construction of a new winery.

Funnily enough, Larry McKenna had never planned to stay in New Zealand for more than a year when he first emigrated in 1980, in pursuit of his Kiwi partner and, at the time, his wife-to-be, Sue. “I was offered a job at Delegat’s by John Hancock (fellow winemaker and old school friend) so I thought I’d stay a year then drag her back home to Australia, but I’ve never looked back.”

Would New Zealand Pinot Noir have come so far in so short a time if he had looked back? I doubt very much that it would have. I recall a trip in 1994, my first year of wine writing, to a remote rural homestead in the Wairarapa for a taste-off of the region’s top three Pinot Noirs: Ata Rangi, Dry River and Martinborough Vineyards. No prizes for guessing that the outlier and by far the most delicate expression of this tricky, thin-skinned grape variety was made by Larry McKenna at Martinborough Vineyards.

It could have been a vintage thing, or it could simply have been that he was onto something special. And, yes, all three Pinot Noirs broke new ground for what has become this country’s great red wine.
So while it is farewell to Larry McKenna at Escarpment, it should be noted that he is not retiring from wine. Watch this space.

Joelle Thomson is a journalist, wine writer and author.

joellethomson.com