Should Have Been a Chef – A Tasting with Nigel Greening of Felton Road

Words by Mike Dean aka The Food W*nker.

~ https://jerseyfoodandwine.com/

Winemakers like to tell stories. Whether it’s about how they started in wine, celebrity run-ins, reeling off encyclopedic knowledge of the weather in previous Summers or just waxing lyrical about their wines, it really seems like it’s a part of the job that they all love.

Nigel Greening, vigneron and proprietor of Felton Road Wines, is no exception.

At the most recent tasting put on by Love Wine with Nigel, he set out his stall at the beginning of the night by stating just that. He loves to tell stories, but more than that he loves to sit around a table with interested and interesting people and talk about his wine and the wines he loves and hear from them about the wines they love. He’s still a wine nerd, after all.

Felton Road was formed in 1991 with the Elms Vineyard, named for Stuart Elms who discovered the potential for winemaking in Bannockburn, Central Otago on the South Island of New Zealand.

Since then three other vineyards have been set up, Macmuir, Calvert, and the very special Cornish Point.

Specialising in Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Riesling, Felton Road’s wines are sellouts every year, and are highly regarded by those in the know.

I was recently lucky enough to be invited to a tasting at the Love Wine shop in town to hear form Nigel about his wines. Having been to a tasting with Nigel before, I knew I was in for a treat.

After a short introduction where he regaled us with a story of how he really wanted to be chef, even being offered the opportunity and work at La Gavroche once up a time after his wife cajoled Albert into it, and discovering that whilst the Roux family ordered his wines every year they weren’t on the menu and were just for the families personal stash, Nigel got into the detail on the wines, and so shall we.

2023 Felton Road Dry Riesling

Made from grapes grown in the schist soil of the Block 2 vineyard, this Riesling has incredible acidity balanced against full fruit, with apple and spice coming through, and wonderful minerality.

Nigel believes in making Riesling the same way that traditional Austrian producers make theirs, the same juice from the same grapes being used to produce all the variations from Trocken (dry) to the sweeter off-dry wines at the end of the scale. It’s about the winemaking, the artistry.

Felton Road currently produces three Rieslings from the Spätlese style, to this Dry Riesling in the middle, and the Bannockburn at the other end.

Felton Road Bannockburn Pinot Noir 2022

After the difficult Summers of 2016 and 2018, Felton Road had 6 summers in a row with seemingly no climate change-based effects, meaning a much more consistent product.

Blended from the best of the grapes of the vineyards, this pinot has purple flowers/ violets and spice and full ripe fruit.

30% of the grapes spend 13months in new French oak from coopers in Burgundy, and that wood will balance out in years to come as it ages, as Nigel noted himself (the man is his own harshest critic).

We then started a couple of comparisons and were poured the 22 Calvert Pinot Noir and the 22 Cornish Point Pinot Noir.

The Calvert is far more pronounced and robust, with fuller fruit and more heft, whereas the Cornish Point is light and elegant, with spice and great acidity which will provide for ageing.

Both wines were delicious, but the Cornish Point seemed to be the favourite of the group.

The Cornish Point is a beautiful vineyard, surrounded by the river, grown on the site of an old gold mine, ironically enough:

We then moved on to a non-Felton Road wine, one that Nigel and Felton Road had a hand in.

La Ferme De Sato Sur Les Nuages – Sato Wines

Yoshiaki & Kyoko Sato left the banking world to make wine. But being diligent they wanted to learn from the best, so after studying viticulture at university in New Zealand both went to work for Nigel at Felton Road to learn first-hand. After 7 years they left Felton Road and started their own winery on the La Ferme De Sato and are now producing this excellent Pinot Noir from their young vines.

Their small plot is on a hillside so steep that the harvest must be done by hand, but this all plays into philosophy of hands-off winemaking. They grow Chardonnay, Chenin Blanc, Gamay, Cabernet Franc and Pinot Noir on their small plot, with their Pinot being aged with no NEW wood meaning it was a fantastic fruit forward balance.

Winemakers to keep an eye on, for sure!

We were finished with the Pinot Noir but weren’t left crestfallen for long as we moved onto the final pair of the night, the Felton Road Bannockburn Chardonnay 2022 and a wine that had caught Nigel’s eye on the shelf, the Lyme Bay Chardonnay 2021, or as Nigel put it “Chardonnay from Essex!”

It seems that winemakers, like all professions, share notes. So when an up-and-coming winery like Lyme Bay is trying to establish itself, it asks for advice, which Nigel has been happy to provide.

Nigel was clear that he had nothing to do with the wine making itself, which is excellent. Apple and citrus to begin, then the crispness gives way to some creaminess and spice. And importantly (at least to me) little oak treatment!

It was excellent to try this against the Bannockburn, something well established as a big hitter, a prime example of a crisp yet complex Chardonnay that people love. 

A major theme that comes through when Nigel talks about his wines is climate change and wine making's effect on it. Felton Road have long been proponents of sustainable farming, with seemingly every organic, bio-dynamic and climate friendly certification available, a B-Corp certification, as well as the wines all undergoing spontaneous, wild fermentation. 'Hands Off' winemaking.

It’s clearly something they care about passionately, with the winery itself being run on solar power that produces so much energy a surplus goes back into the grid. Even for the South Island of New Zealand, which is powered entirely by renewable sources (mostly hydro). They’re even using drones for spraying, saving energy and time.

Alas it was then time for Nigel to go. He had a reservation somewhere to see friends and our time chewing his ear off and listening to him was over. Truly a man passionate about what he does, even after all these years. I for one have about a month of research to do on the winemakers and wines he mentioned in passing or in detail, and hopefully decades more of wines to try from Felton Road. Especially that Cornish Point.

The Wines