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Three vineyards within a one kilometre radius each won gold medals for their wine at the Romeo Bragato awards. Laura Basham looks at what is so special about this grape-growing area.

Kina vineyard owner Dave Birt calls this land the golden triangle.

He, along with neighbouring Renato Estate and Blackenbrook Vineyard at Tasman, picked up gold medals at the 2009 Romeo Bragato Wine Awards last week.

Their vineyards are within a one kilometre radius, and on each the vines' roots grow deep into Moutere clay gravels, absorbing its minerality, and the afternoon sea breeze slows the grapes' ripening giving intense fruit flavours. It's a grower's heaven but it requires a passion and a lot of hard work to nurture the vines and their fruit to perfection.

That's what the Bragato awards recognise and celebrate, the grower's contribution to producing excellent wines.

Each of these three growers at Kina-Tasman has a strong belief that it is the land and healthy vines that create the wine.

As Blackenbrook Vineyard owner Daniel Schwarzenbach puts it: "We have a simple philosophy of promoting healthy soils that promote healthy roots, creating strong vines, producing balanced fruit and juice leading to balanced wines."

However, first a grower has to find suitable land able to do that, and ending up at Kina-Tasman has been a mission for each of the trio.

Mr Schwarzenbach and his wife Ursula, who met in Switzerland and moved to Nelson in 1998, searched for their ideal piece of land for nearly two years, before buying their 14ha block in Tasman on the coastal highway. Its gentle north-facing slope, the Moutere clay soils and the mild maritime climate were an instant appeal.

Renat Nussbaumer, who is from a Swiss wine-making family, spent two years searching in Western Australia and New Zealand until he found his ideal 11ha site on the Kina Peninsula in 1998 and replanted the apple orchard in vines. Besides its stunning views across the bay, its micro-climate - with little rain during the growing season, lots of sunshine but the sea breeze ensuring cool nights, mild spring and autumn temperatures and a warm north-facing slope with clay-based soils - was what he was looking for to make aromatic wines.

For Mr Birt, his find was the realisation of a dream. He had been working for Shell for 35 years, and was its northern retail manager looking after its service stations, but he harboured a passion for wine. The passion became an obsession which his wife, Pam, now calls his midlife crisis. "It could have been a lot worse. Lots of guys at that stage do a lot of crazier things," he said.

They visited hundreds of vineyards in New Zealand and Australia. "The more I looked, the more the passion grew for actually doing it rather than just tasting."

So, at 50, he went to EIT in Hawke's Bay to study viticulture and winemaking. "From that and because I love chardonnay and pinot noir, I started dreaming about one day buying the right piece of land.'

One of his EIT assignments was to look at how to pick a site to grow a specific variety of grapes, so he used it to analyse what was needed for chardonnay and pinot noir. He is not a fan of over-oaked, over-manufactured chardonnays, so his starting point was to get the grapes right.

"I theorised in my assignment that if you had a cool breeze in the afternoon coming from the sea then that would keep up the fruity character in the grapes which would allow for more slow ripening and then we'd get a more elegant wine at the end of the day," he says.

Every holiday they went in search of existing pinot noir and chardonnay areas, and came to Nelson 1996. A fan of Neudorf wines, he spent time talking to Tim and Judy Finn about soil types, and decided the Moutere clay gravels their vines grew in were a must for his wish-list.

"Suddenly I said to Pam, `We've got to go to Nelson', which meant leaving jobs so it was more of an upheaval than I had previously thought," he says. So the search began and after looking at 30 properties, they found their dream site by mistake.

Their real estate agent had pointed them in the direction of a property further back towards Tasman, but they missed the sign and ended up at Dee Rd, where retiring orchardists Don and Joan Tait wanted to sell up.

"I sat at the bottom of Dee Rd and said, `This is everything I want'. It is Moutere clay gravels and close to the sea, and we tasted an apple and it was very crisp and juicy and I thought this is a good sign. We didn't even look at the house at that stage. It was the land we bought it for."

What is special about the land for the three vineyards is that they have the same Moutere clay gravels, an ancient hill soil type that disappears into the sea. It is unusual because normally there would be a marshland and wetland area between the coastline and the hills, he says.

"The thing that brought all of us together was this common view that this would be a fabulous area for viticulture; not just for growing grapes but doing it at a world class level," said Mr Birt.

So in 1998 they began planting 10,000 vines on their 6ha vineyard, initially half in seven clones of pinot noir, and the other half in chardonnay with mendoza and clone 15. Small blocks of merlot, cabernet franc and sauvignon blanc followed.

The Moutere clay gravels they are planted in have a water-holding capacity, which means he doesn't irrigate, but it is also open and friable because of the gravel content so the vine roots are not sitting in a wet zone. In the summer as the soil dries out the roots go deeper and deeper looking for the moisture, and that gives the special characteristics in the wine, known as minerality.

"It's the thing you get in good wine that doesn't taste necessarily of grapes and winemaking, it has an extra complexity, something that has come from the soil. The French sum it up with `terroir' meaning this place, these vines, these people and this wine.

"A lot of that is the soil type and the extraction you get from getting those roots down low and it only gets better as your vines get older.

"We did well with our wines early on but they are definitely getting better and I guess we are getting older and more experienced in the vineyard as well."

Everything in the vineyard is done by hand, and it's intensive work obsessively leaf plucking and fruit thinning four or five times over summer, first reducing the number of bunches, then picking little bits of under-ripe fruit off the sides.

"When the fruit leaves here to go to the winery the wine is pretty well made at that point. You need a very competent winemaker, but you've put the seal on how the wine is going to taste at the point of harvest," says Mr Birt.

Pouring a glass of his award-winning chardonnay, he tastes, savouring its citrusy flavour and a complexity the judges must have liked, and he says: "Yummy."

BRAGATO WINE AWARDS
Gold medals for Kina-Tasman growers:

• Kina Beach 2007 Reserve Chardonnay
• Blackenbrook Vineyard 2008 Pinot Gris
• Renato Estate 2008 Pinot Gris

Kina Beach Wines ... a taste of our place!