Craggy Range: producer profile plus 12 wines to try

The name Craggy Range will be a familiar one to many Decanter readers – after all, the estate has been producing acclaimed fine wines for more than 20 years. I remember attending a Craggy Range tasting back in 2005, where I was introduced to the prestige range. To use the Kiwi vernacular, I was ‘blown away’ at the quality. Frankly, I still am.

Craggy Range is steeped in the vision of Terry and Mary Peabody: the desire to find unique vineyard sites and make fine wines that echo where they came from. In the early 1990s that vision transformed and became their family legacy: estate wines created from untouched land, where a focus on quality could begin, quite literally, from the ground up.

Scroll down to see tasting notes and scores for 12 Craggy Range wines to try

The search for such a piece of bare earth took several years, leading the Peabodys through France, the Americas and even their home base in Australia. But it was in New Zealand that they found what they were looking for.

The exact sites were located soon after Terry was introduced to New Zealander Steve Smith, a Master of Wine and viticulture specialist. They formed a close friendship and strong business partnership, their innate understanding of terroir helping them to discover some of the very best parcels of land in which to invest.

Craggy Range at a glance

Established 1998, by owners and founders Terry and Mary Peabody

Winemaker Julian Grounds

Key sites Gimblett Gravels and Kidnappers Vineyard in Hawke’s Bay (Cape Kidnappers), Te Muna Road in Wairarapa, and various vineyards in Marlborough

Area planted 400ha

First commercial vintage 2001, which included Le Sol, Sophia and The Quarry; first vintage of Aroha was 2006, released in 2008

Annual production About 1m bottles, depending on conditions. In 2021, Aroha, Le Sol, Les Beaux Cailloux, Sophia and The Quarry totalled 16,800 bottles

Screwcap closures From 2018

From the ground up

One of the first parcels of virgin land they purchased was in the Gimblett Gravels wine-growing district in Hawke’s Bay on the North Island. Here, under the Craggy Range name, they cultivated almost 100ha, planting Syrah, Merlot and Cabernets Sauvignon and Franc on stony, sandy alluvial soils. These gravels are warm, dry and free-draining – not dissimilar to some of the better sites in the Médoc in Bordeaux and the northern Rhône’s Hermitage appellation. Today, these Gimblett Gravels sites, along with the Kidnappers Vineyard near Te Awanga in Hawke’s Bay, are key to the Craggy Range portfolio.

They also found sites in what they called the ‘warm-cool’ regions of Martinborough in the south of the North Island, followed by Marlborough and Nelson just across the Cook Strait at the top of South Island. The Te Muna Road vineyard in Martinborough, home to the majority of Craggy Range’s Pinot Noir, is on clay-rich rocky soils, while the Sauvignon Blanc vines here are on gravelly soils. Sites on the stony soils of Marlborough and Nelson deliver Craggy Range’s excellent Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling.

In the cool continental climate of Central Otago in the south of the South Island, small parcels of Pinot Noir were planted on old clay and weathered soils within the Cromwell basin, to the east of Queenstown. And not far away, in the Waitaki Valley, Craggy Range was one of the first companies to establish Pinot Gris vines on limestone-rich alluvial soils.

All in the name

Regardless of the vineyard, almost all fruit is harvested by hand, with the lion’s share of the wines made, back on the North Island, at Craggy Range’s modern Gimblett Gravels winery in Fernhill, adjacent to the vineyards and barrel hall. The second facility, the Giants winery, is under the famous Te Mata Peak in Havelock North, southeast of Fernhill, and is the public face of Craggy Range, where visitors can book experiences in the wine-tasting room, eat in the fine-dining restaurant and stay in boutique accommodation.

A winery tour takes you to the Sophia barrel hall, where the prestige Merlot-dominant Bordeaux blend of the same name is fermented in a dozen 8,000-litre French oak vats. Adjacent to this space is the Quarry barrel hall, where Sophia and its Cabernet Sauvignon-dominant sister blend The Quarry mature after blending. Both are aged for 18 months in French oak barrels, 36% new.

As lovers of Craggy Range wines will know, the majority of its prestige wines are known by (and labelled with) an iconic name. While the winery’s website explains that Sophia (‘wisdom’ in Greek) ‘pays tribute to the goddess of knowledge and experience, information and understanding – a philosophy adopted by our winemakers and viticulturists when crafting this wine’, I have it on good authority the wine was in fact named after the actress Sophia Loren.

The Quarry, meanwhile, has more prosaic origins. In 1876, extensive flooding in Hawke’s Bay saw river water spreading across the countryside. Much of the newly exposed soil was seen by many as a useless wasteland, only fit to quarry. However, thanks to a small group of local vignerons, this land, once destined to be a stone and sand supply yard, is today a prestige vineyard.

Le Sol – ‘earth’ or ‘soil’ in French – recognises the distinct expression that the Gimblett Gravels terroir exudes into this 100% Syrah. Le Sol 2020 was made with 56% whole-bunch fruit, naturally fermented in 38% new French and Austrian barriques and puncheons, then aged for 17 months. Steve Smith MW named the winery’s prestige Chardonnay Les Beaux Cailloux after the small pebbles in which the vines are planted on the Gimblett Gravels. The 2020 spent 10 months in 33% new French oak.

The last ‘named’ prestige cuvée hails from the Te Muna site in Martinborough: Aroha means ‘love’ in Māori. A Pinot Noir using up to seven clones, the 2020 is made with 70% whole-bunch fruit, and wild-yeast fermented in a mix of open-top stainless-steel tanks and French oak vats before ageing in barriques for 14 months, 34% new.

A new project underway here is the development of a high-density, dry-grown site in Te Muna that aims to further showcase the proclivity for Pinot Noir to reflect its ‘aroha’ with the land.

A bold future

This affinity with the earth has been all-important to Craggy Range from the beginning. And its biodiversity project is one of, if not the biggest of its kind from a New Zealand wine brand. Nearly 50ha of land are replanted with native trees to attract more birdlife, in keeping with the Peabody family philosophy of giving back to the land.

Now that Craggy Range has celebrated more than 20 seasons of wine-growing, one of the next steps is conversion to organics. ‘We want to be here for the next thousand years,’ says marketing manager and third-generation family member David Peabody Jr.

With Craggy Range wines now enjoying a global reputation for quality, consistency and longevity, the team decided this year to join La Place de Bordeaux. The Le Sol 2020 and Aroha 2020 are the first New Zealand wines (along with Destiny Bay’s Magna Praemia 2019 from Waiheke Island) to launch on the historic négociant network, and the wines will both be represented by two of Bordeaux’s oldest négociants, CVBG and Mähler-Besse, in both Europe and Asia.

As Peabody Jr told Decanter earlier this year, La Place ‘made sense’ for Craggy Range, ‘reinforcing the idea that New Zealand does have a place in the world of fine wine’ and highlighting those special vineyard sites in Gimblett Gravels and Te Muna Road that were identified so many years ago.

A dozen Craggy Range wines worth seeking out

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