Soil, Vine, and Duration

This instinct – incessant curiosity, deep attention – is probably the reason that Black Estate, a family-owned winery and organic restaurant in the Omihi, North Canterbury, has become a globally recognised pioneer in sustainable viticulture and natural, terroir-driven wines. We're sitting in their on-site restaurant, overlooking a landscape that stretches towards the Omihi hills. The building is raw and restrained in black timber, punctuated by a small, distinctive art work on the wall – a Wayne Youle piece that also doubles as a pét-nat label. The whole thing is understated, effortlessly cool and on the surface, deceptively simple. It's only through conversation that you begin to appreciate the extraordinary amount of thought and care required to create something so utterly true.
It's tempting to describe Nicholas and Pen as winemakers, but that feels incomplete.

Their remit is astonishingly broad: restaurateurs, regenerative and biodynamic farmers, perpetual students, occasional DJ’s and – I'll claim it – purveyors of the best pie in Te Waipounamu. Yet none of these pursuits feel separate; every endeavor seems to reveal another discipline worth understanding. It all ultimately feeds the same ambition: to understand this place deeply enough to express it with complete integrity.

As a result, conversation with these two has a habit of changing scale. You can seamlessly shift from the minutiae of North Canterbury soil – microbes, fungi, clay – to wine bars in Tokyo, anecdotes of sharing bottles with people who have similarly dedicated their lives to expressing entirely different landscapes. The Black Estate community is at once hyper-local and surprisingly international, friendships forged on a shared devotion to understanding one small corner of the world. 

“We love the idea that people are drawn to certain landscapes. When we first came here, obviously Nicholas was really interested in the limestone and clay soils. But it was also just a feeling. We came here and thought, 'We could live here.' There was just something about North Canterbury."
“For me personally,” adds Nicholas, “it was the landscape first. Coming from Christchurch, driving north through Kaiapoi and Amberley, I always found the landscape quite austere – gravelly, inhospitable even. But when you move into the Omihi Valley, there's a softness to the light and the hills. You move from gravel to clay. It just seemed to match the feeling a bit more. So yeah, it was the landscape primarily for me. Then, after that, it was the people.” 

Black Estate is both certified organic and biodynamic, labels that can quickly send conversations down rabbit holes of farming philosophy and agricultural jargon. But stripped back, what Nicholas and Pen are describing is simple: paying closer attention to a place than most people will ever have the opportunity to. Black Estate doesn't just produce wine from the land; it exists wholly in relationship with it. The vines are only one part of a living system that includes sheep, Angus cattle, compost, cover crops, insects, fungi and people. Organic and biodynamic farming aren't treated as prescriptive philosophies to follow so much as tools for getting to know this particular place. In simplest form, the idea is that healthy soils nurture healthy vines. Healthy vines produce fruit that speaks more clearly of where it comes from. Everything is connected.

A bottle of Black Estate wine comes from a single vineyard – be it Home, Netherwood, Damsteep or Skypunch. So, rather than receiving a bunch of fruit from multiple growers and shaping it into a finished product, Nicholas and Pen are working with one unique landscape. By harvest, Nicholas knows every block intimately because they've spent the season responding to it. The finished product, the wine, is as close as they can get to expressing this very particular place. 

"It's a more exciting way of making wine. I can touch the whole process.”

Pen agrees. "If you're lucky enough to enjoy a beautiful glass of wine that's been made in these ways, there can be so much good energy. It’s not about alcohol so much as it’s about a crafted experience."

That good energy feeds into everything. For all the serious thinking and mahi that goes on behind the scenes, there’s an undeniable sense of levity and joy here. "Lightness, and a lack of pretension is so important. At the end of the day, it's just food and wine, right?” Pen says. “Nicholas is really detailed... whereas I'm all about the vibe. But of course, the vibe isn’t real unless the foundation is there. It's got to be light, but it’s also got to be well made and balanced and beautiful.”

“I think, for us, we will always aspire for things to be true. So whether that's the food, the style of service, or the materials in this building. The wine doesn't have any additions, the soil and the plants have had no systemic chemicals or heavy irrigation. Everything’s real here.”