From LISTENER

by Keith Stewart
Going Dutch

Bugman Ruud Kleinpaste is fond of saying that the Dutch claim to culinary pedigree in New Zealand is not so much the contribution of immigrants who agitated for wine in restaurant 40 years ago, but their seminal role in the first European takeaway event. Not selling it, being it, as four Dutch sailors from Abel Tasman's crew were made a meal of by Ngati Tumata-kokiri in December 1642.

This tradition is now being advanced in the wine industry with the development of a new label by recent immigrants from the Netherlands, Dorien Vermaas and Ruud Maasdam. The packaging of their wines reveals an aversion to the Maori dimension of that original event, by having almost no visual reference to New Zealand at all. Called Staete Landt in honour of Tasman's map of the country as he saw it, the bottles look more South African than New Zealand in origin, but the wine inside them is unquivocally Marlborough.

Staete Lande is based in Raupara Road, in the heart of the finest viticultural land on the Wairau Plain, with Shingle Peak, Stoneleigh, Cloudy Bay, Hunter's and Allan Scott as neighbours, and their presence is a sign of the increasingly cosmopolitan character of Marlborough. With French, Australian, Swiss, British, South African and now Dutch investors moving their money, their lifestyles and their dreams to the top of the South Island, the character of Marlborough wine must gain from their various attitudes to what is and what isn't good wine.

In the case of Staete Landt, this is obviously a sophisticated European palate inclined to look for more cerebral, less obviously delectable wines, with the accent on dryness and structure in support of intense flavours. As the vineyard is already planted in the principal dry wine varieties of Marlborough -- pinot noir, chardonnay and sauvignon blanc, with a tiny exploratory block of pinot gris -- it will be a worthy label for clever wine drinkers to follow in the coming years, as its proprietors come to grips with the juicy distraction of Marlborough fruit.

In a year when all the news has been of corporate excess, from take-overs to land purchases, it is refreshing to find a hands-on couple bringing a different vision to Marlborough, and variety to what can be a pretty homogenous round of savvy blanc and stainless steel. It also prompts our cultural memory to acknowledge the considerable influence of recent immigrants in the culinary virtuosity that we now claim as a feature of our culture. Perhaps if Abel Tasman had stayed longer, we could have had wine like this a long time ago.