New Zealand and Burgundian Chardonnay go head-to-head in global tastings to see if opposites attract

It was an ambitious benchmarking exercise. One New Zealand producer pitting its Chardonnays – blind – against some of the top names and appellations in Burgundy.

Three tastings: held in Christchurch, London and the Côte d’Or. Tasting panels that included multiple Masters of Wine, Master Sommeliers and other experts.

Twenty-four wines split over four flights. Would the New Zealand wines stand a chance against their European near-Antipode or would they stand out like a sore thumb against Burgundy’s perfect manicures?

Would wines from the opposite side of the world prove equally irresistible? How would New Zealand tūrangawaewae* match up to Burgundian terroir?

Now, Steve MW, co-owner of Aotearoa New Zealand Fine Wine Estates (AONZ), which include Pyramid Valley and Smith & Sheth, the wineries behind this exercise, made it very clear that this was not designed to be a ‘gotcha-Judgement-of-Paris-New-Zealand-beats-Burgundy’ style tasting.

He has explained at length the motivation behind it, writing: ‘The Opposites Attract idea comes from some simple truths. Burgundy is home to the world’s greatest Chardonnay wines. At almost the exact antipode of Burgundy sit the Chardonnay vineyards of New Zealand.

‘This famous white grape grows no further away from its spiritual homeland than in New Zealand. To make the story even more interesting, sitting within New Zealand we have Chardonnay vines growing on rare soils that are geologically similar to the mid-slopes of the Côte d’Or.

'In our sunny, maritime and at times cool climate, some have made analogies that wine from these vineyards show a close similarity to the white wines of Burgundy.’

The results were certainly enough to cock an eyebrow or two, with the combined results from the three locations showing a New Zealand wine being the best rated on average in three of the four flights (see full results in the tables below).

Emma Jenkins MW took part in the Christchurch leg of the tasting and I tasted the wines in Burgundy. Here are our thoughts on what the tasting showed and what we learned from the experience.

*A Māori term meaning ‘a place to stand’, places of empowerment and connection.

What did I expect from the tasting beforehand?

Rupert Millar (RM): As an avowed fan of Chardonnay from both Burgundy and New Zealand I was expecting nothing less than an absolutely delightful tasting of first class wines – which is what I got.

I’ve certainly had New Zealand Chardonnays that really struck me as ‘Burgundy-like’ or ‘Côte d’Or challengers’ so I was really interested to actually put some side-by-side and see if that analogy was correct.

Emma Jenkins MW (EJ): I have the advantage of seeing the quality of top New Zealand Chardonnay regularly so I already had high expectations.

Even still, I was happily surprised at how well the New Zealand wines performed, not just against the Burgundy but also simply as wines of real presence and character.

And could I tell the Burgundies from the New Zealanders?

RM: In my case, err, no. Not very well. I had a complete shocker to be perfectly honest. No need to reveal the final score but I’m sure I made Steve Smith and co very happy with their little experiment given my guesses.

EJ: Hah, well Rupert, you need not feel alone there. Apparently my blind tasting skills peaked 16 years ago when I was sitting my MW exams and it’s been all downhill from there. I was really surprised by how tricky it was to identify the origin. I got Cool and Refreshing (Flight 2) all correct and had a pretty good strike rate on Rare and Definitive (Flight 4) but the rest were not much better than what one would expect from chance.

I like drinking Chablis so maybe I was more attuned to it but I may simply have been lucky. Across the three tastings the panels were no better, really. Burgundies were called Burgundy 57% of the time, and the New Zealand wines were called Burgundy 52% of the time.

What gave the wines away – or didn't?

RM: Well, I’m not sure I can properly answer that. That said, ‘tells’ I thought would be clearer, such as ripeness, acidity and fruit profile were in no way as clear cut as I thought they might be. A slightly reductive (badum-tish) starting off point perhaps but not having had much New Zealand Chardonnay or top-flight white Burgundy for a while such were the straws I had to grasp.

The vintages chosen for each region certainly contributed to this, with the Burgundies being much riper and richer and the New Zealanders rather leaner.

EJ: Yes, I suspect the vintages might have been a contributing factor to the confusion but I also wondered about just how much high-end Chardonnay winemaking can skew things.

After all, the approaches are so similar for the most part, so possibly the model we have in mind for what top Chardonnay should look like is in the main just classical Burgundian winemaking. I went into the tasting expecting the fruit purity, shape of the acid, and maybe a ‘sweeter’ fruit core would be the ‘tells’ for NZ, but my personal strike rate on the wines suggest this was not as reliable a plan as hoped.

The clearest ‘tell’ for me were the Pyramid Valley Waikari wines. Their acidity was vividly electric rather than just high, and interestingly they were also the wines least mistaken for Burgundy (misattributed by roughly a quarter to a third overall).

I think it was interesting that these were the most consistently identified as New Zealand wines, given that arguably their soils are the closest to much of that found in Burgundy.

At the top end, the sheer power of the grand cru wines was evident, though the Smith & Sheth Les Graviers, from Hawke’s Bay, was in fact called Burgundy overall more often than any of the actual Burgundies.

Half of the blend is a clone selected by Smith from a single vine in Le Montrachet in 1995, but I think it’s impossible to untangle the influence of clone, winemaking and site. This is the first release of this wine, and just 300 bottles were made, so it’s an impressive start for sure while also a bit of an unknown quantity at the moment.

Did being the more Burgundian-seeming wines influence your score?

RM: Although my origin guessing was pretty atrocious, my overall scoring was broadly in-line with my fellow tasters so I think I identified quality when I saw it regardless of origin.

EJ: This is one of the more fascinating aspects for me. Wines that tasters thought were Burgundies tended to score higher, regardless of their actual origin.

That could reflect inherent quality, or it could be partly bias, with tasters assuming the best wines must be Burgundy and scoring accordingly. The tasting ultimately can’t separate this element.

Afterwards I thought a lot about how much we are conditioned to think of (top) Burgundy as the style benchmark and how that might unconsciously affect how we perceive and assess other wines.

I am not sure I can tell you how much impact that had for my own results but it is a possible bias I am more alert to now.

Were you convinced by the final arguments and conclusions?

RM: Yeeees and no. Emma has much more insightful views on this. The idea that New Zealand is some sort of antipodean mirror of Burgundy didn’t fully convince me.

Apparently if you were to stick a godly knitting needle through the Earth starting at Christchurch it’d emerge at A Coruña in Galicia over 1,500km from Burgundy.

But if you stabbed again through Beaune you’d end up just over 1,000km off New Zealand's South Island in the Pacific.

More pertinently, as well as being on the opposite side of the world a lot of New Zealand’s winemaking conditions are very different to Burgundy. It’s largely a maritime rather than a continental climate; and with the exception of Waikari in Canterbury (and just a dash in Low Burn, Central Otago) there’s precious little clay-limestone either with most soils being greywacke, loess, loam and schist. So not very similar at all.

Cool climate, sure, but if anything it was a greater display of wines being so similar in style and quality despite being opposite in so many ways. Might we question the role of winemaking instead? Does New Zealand need to be Burgundy?

But, ultimately, I can only come away reinforced in my previously-held conviction that New Zealand absolutely produces exceptionally fine Chardonnays that can stand their ground next to Burgundy.

And if you’re an avowed fan of white Burgundy and looking for additions/alternatives/a new fix/something cheaper then you should absolutely be looking to New Zealand for options.

EJ: Yes, this is the bit where marketing crashes into reality. I think the Achilles heel for the Burgundy-NZ analogue is that the New Zealand wine most mistaken for Burgundy was Les Graviers, from the Gimblett Gravels.

Anyone who has been there can tell you it couldn’t be less like Burgundy’s soils, given it is deep river gravels still underwater barely 200 years ago.

Steve suggested the Growing Degree Days of the vintages were equivalent and sure, but the Gravels are also barely 20km from the coast and it’s just… not Burgundy.

That doesn’t negate the result though, it just means that top New Zealand Chardonnay can stand on its own two feet and I think that is a very important point not to lose by trying to make any tenuous connections to Burgundy terroir.

In my view, New Zealand Chardonnay quality has been on an upwards trajectory for some time, so for me this tasting was more an impressive underscoring of that than a revelation, though the extent of it still surprised me.

I’m not sure I can pinpoint a ’secret sauce’ but largely cool, maritime-influenced growing conditions, AONZ’s excellent viticulture and winemaking, and styles that while diverse, are akin to good Burgundy all play a part.

In the combined results, every wine averaged above 90 points. These wines are good because they are good, not simply because they hold their own against or might resemble Burgundy.

Do the New Zealand wines appear good value?

RM: Oh absolutely and the price:quality ratio only gets better the higher up the Burgundy ladder you climb. The AONZ team certainly didn’t put their wines up against a bunch of patsies either.

You can undoubtedly find some good value white Burgundy still but this certainly proved a point.

EJ: Yes, I think this aspect is the easiest takeaway. Across the three locations, the Saint-Véran was twice the top scorer in its flight above the Côte de Beaune premiers crus, and all three grand cru Chablis scored below both the Low Burn and Pyramid Valley North Canterbury in London.

So in the main price didn’t consistently track either scoring, or provenance. While there is certainly a range of pricing across New Zealand Chardonnay, the top wines in particular remain remarkably good value when compared to their global peers. I think that possibly this is the strongest message from this tasting.

Value is a relative term though. Are you looking for something delicious to drink, something to cellar, or for resale…?

This will undoubtedly affect the lens through which this is viewed.

Running this test again, what would I change?

RM: I would love to have had more New Zealand Chardonnays in the mix. Obviously as one producer’s brainchild they wanted to pit their own wines against Burgundy but a few more top names from Aotearoa would’ve made this exercise doubly interesting as a benchmark.

I also think I’d run it again with vintages that are somewhat more like-for-like; either warmer or cooler. I’d like to see full-on racy vintages going head-to-head. How would the Low Burn from Central Otago fare against Chablis at its crispest?

And, just to be an agent of chaos, it would have been fun to see some of France’s more established critics take part in this exercise, if only for some inevitable chuntering and spluttering as they realised they’d given top marks to a non-native Chardonnay.

Maybe some were invited but, sensing a piège à la Spurrier they opted to stay away.

EJ: Can’t argue with any of that. I’d also be curious to see what happened if we tasted the same wines with say, five or 10 years of bottle age.

I think New Zealand Chardonnay certainly can age but whether it develops in a manner that is as appreciated as that of the Burgundies would be interesting to see.

And was there a final thing you learned from the experience?

RM: I need to get better at blind tasting. And drink more New Zealand Chardonnay – clearly.

EJ: Haha, yep! I am lucky enough to drink a lot of good New Zealand Chardonnay but I think it’s very much a category flying under the radar for too many wine drinkers.

As Smith said in Christchurch: ‘If you want to make progress in a field, you have to have visibility. Very few customers of fine wine know much about these wines.’

I like to think this tasting might help change that.

The Tasting Flights

Related articles