How the world's southernmost wine region went from curiosity to cult in twenty-five years.
In 1990, Central Otago had fewer than a dozen hectares of vines and a reputation for being impossible. Today its finest Pinot Noirs are allocated, traded and cellared beside Burgundy.
The region's secret is a climate that exists nowhere else in New Zealand: semi-continental, brutally sunny, cold at night, dry enough that disease pressure is nearly absent. Schist soils do the rest.
For collectors, Otago remains one of the few places on earth where wines of genuine cellar pedigree can still be bought at first-release prices. That anomaly will not survive the decade.
