Nectar from the vine - NZ stickies
New Zealand dessert wines or "stickies" are an important and fast-growing segment of the Kiwi wine industry.
The recent lifting of export legislation regarding Kiwi stickies in the UK and European Union means that continental wine lovers can now buy New Zealand dessert wines in their home countries.
In the 2009 edition of the Buyer’s Guide to New Zealand Wines, author and wine critic Michael Cooper writes that "winemakers around [New Zealand] work hard to produce some ravishingly beautiful, honey-sweet white wines that are worth discovering and can certainly hold their own internationally".
Most New Zealand wineries produce stickies, but not necessarily every year as production depends on weather and temperature conditions.
Botrytis on the vine
New Zealand wine commentator Glenda Neil says the term "stickies" was given to dessert wines because of the "very sticky or viscous nature of these wines".
The sweetest of the stickies, botrytised wine is made from grapes that have been affected by noble rot, or botrytis cinea.
"The botrytis mould grows only when conditions in the vineyard are ideal for its development with misty mornings, fine sunny days and low humidity," Neil says.
Botrytis dehydrates the grapes, concentrating the sugars and causing the berries to shrivel until each grape holds barely a drop of juice, says Neil. The resulting juice is thick and syrupy, with extremely high sugar content. When fermented, the end result is an intensely sweet wine.
Sticky types
Dessert wine tends to come in varying degrees of sweetness - with botrytised wine at the top of the scale. Ice wine and late harvest wines come in somewhere in the middle.
Ice wines are made exactly as the name suggests, by leaving the grapes on the vine until the first frosts freeze them over. The berries are then crushed and pressed, using the frozen water content to concentrate the sugar and acid.
"New Zealand ice wines are often made by ‘freeze-concentration’, where the grapes are picked as usual, then frozen prior to crushing," says Neil.
Late harvest wines result from when the grapes are harvested in late autumn - so it depends very much on weather - allowing time for the sugars to build up and the grapes to become dehydrated.
Sticky trail
Most of New Zealand’s wine-producing regions also make stickies - although the nature of the dessert wine means that most wineries can only make it in years when weather and temperature conditions are right. It pays to call the winery before making a tasting visit to see if they have any sweet wines in stock.
The Marlborough region, at the top of the South Island and considered New Zealand’s largest grape and wine producing region, is also the most prolific when it comes to producing stickies. The award-winning Forrest Estate is located here, as well as Framingham, which produces a critically-acclaimed range of noble riesling.
Hawke’s Bay, on the North Island’s eastern coast and with some of New Zealand’s highest sunshine hours, is the country’s second-largest producer of stickies.
Dessert wine awards
Forrest Estate, located in the South Island’s Marlborough region, is the most-awarded winery in New Zealand for dessert wine.
Marlborough is a world-class wine region, with 100-plus vineyards that produce more than half of New Zealand’s wine.
Forrest Estate’s 2006 botrytised riesling, drawn from three vineyards located in the Wairau Valley, the heartland of Marlborough wine country, is an internationally-awarded wine, with notes of honey and toffee.
It has won several overseas accolades including double gold for ‘Best of Show, Dessert’ at the 2007 San Francisco Wine Competition, and the ‘Blue Gold’ award at the 2007 Sydney International Wine Competition.
Forrest Estate’s 2009 late harvest sauvignon blanc, grown round the stony Wairau River, has already picked up an award at a local wine show and owner Dr John Forrest has high hopes that it will do well internationally.
More information:
New Zealand wine industry
Classic New Zealand Wine Trail
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