Matt Kirby is an Aussie winemaker who previously worked in the Clare Valley. But he migrated to New Zealand is now the winemaker at Clearview Estate in Hawke’s Bay. His first vintage was 2015. I visited with him on a beautiful spring Hawke’s Bay day.
Clearview was established by Tim Turvey and is based in the Te Awanga sub region on the coast. Here it’s 5 C cooler than the Gimblett Gravels, the warmest sub-region in Hawke’s Bay, and this climatic freshness shows up in the wines. For example, with Chardonnay they get very good acidity even when the grapes are pretty ripe: a typical analysis would be 10 g/litre TA at 23.5 Brix, so there’s no need ever to acidify.
Altogether, Clearview have 50 hectares of vines owned and contracted. We drove around, checking some of them out.
One stop was at a premium red block owned by a grower who’s an ex-Google executive.
Then we looked at Cleaview’s premium Chardonnay block. Here, they are renewing the vines to offset trunk disease by growing up water shoots and retraining them to be new trunks, then cutting off the disease affected older trunks. It’s an efficient way of renewing the vines, because it maintains the root system.
The wines here are very fine, and fly under the radar a bit, in part because the focus is almost entirely on the domestic market. They are worth checking out: Matt is doing a good job here.