News and updates
May 2019
After a prolonged drought over the summer, harvest was the earliest on record and fast and furious! We began picking on the 11th of March, finishing one week later on the 18th. The fruit was in impeccable condition with great flavour, colour and concentration. This one should go down in history as one of the best ever!
We've just closed the Cellar Door for the season, though the Rimu Wine Bar on Mapua wharf still offers tastings and off-premise sales year round. We've just released our 2018 Rimu Grove Chardonnay and 2018 Bronte Pinot Noir. Both are available for tasting at the wine bar or you can hop over to the buy wine page to order yourself a case or two.
Wishing you all the best for a warm and cozy winter!
Cheers,
Patrick
June 2015
Bone tired and slightly shell shocked though we may be; we are also sporting huge smiles. Because this year was another good one!
This year could well be our earliest harvest ever. The grapes sort of snuck up on us this year. Towards the end of April we felt a little tap on the shoulder and when we turned around to look there they were, hanging on the vine, wide eyed, ripe and ready to harvest. So Luke assembled his minions and we started picking. Making the most of a little stretch of beautiful weather we put our heads down and charged through the whole vineyard in 10 days straight picking, thereby avoiding the rain and grey days of muggy drizzle that set in after Easter. And so, around about the time we would usually be starting the harvest, this year the pickers were clinking glasses together on the deck and starting the end-of-harvest party season instead. And meanwhile, up at the winery, Patrick was doing that thing he sometimes does where he throws his arms out wide in speechless rapture as he tasted the gorgeous flavours filling the winery.
And once again we had the best crew we could hope for. Energetic, hardworking, humorous and unstoppably optimistic, they truly added the secret ingredient to all our wines again this year. After working hard all day in famous Nelson sunshine, the crew would return to the winery for cold beers and cold showers, before wandering down to our impromptu campground by the pond at the bottom of the vineyard to gather round the fire and barbeque, chat and play music each night. We were even blessed with a full lunar eclipse one night right in the middle of the harvest to give this year an extra dose of magic. With Rimu Grove’s usual diversity, France, Germany, The UK, Argentina and Latvia were all represented, and to really mix things up we even had one true born New Zealander in the crew this year!
All the best,
The Crew at Rimu Grove
November 2014
Spring has arrived, the vines are growing like crazy and Rimu Grove is gearing up for another season. Our crew in the vineyard are thinning out the unneeded shoots, while down in the winery we’ve just bottled our new releases and the Cellar Door has just started its summer opening hours, 11:00am to 5:00pm daily.
The whole crew at Rimu Grove managed to get away for some R&R at the end of winter. Patrick made it back to the States to visit family and friends in San Fran and see his oldest son get married and Mum turn 92 (going on 30!). Luke flew around the world, stopping in the States to visit family and then heading onwards to Iceland, Scotland, Italy and Hong Kong catching up with friends along the way. And Yvan headed back to Switzerland, Belgium and Germany to visit his family there and to do a vintage at Domaine des Vallieres in Geneva. But now we’re all back, re-energised and ready for the busy season ahead.
We have a couple new Single Release wines in our line up for this year:
First up,
The Lumberjack - Oaked Pinot Gris
This Pinot Gris is a blend of two barrels, one which was aged on lees for 12 months and the other for 24 months, resulting in a dry but creamy and opulent wine. The aromatics are true to the Pinot Gris varietal with ripe pear, dried apple and sweet spices. The long barrel aging adds an extra layer of complexity with underlying hints of honey and toast. Yet another style of the Pinot Gris we cherish so much at Rimu Grove.
The Tom, Dick and Harry - Pinot Gris, Gewurztraminer and Riesling
This aromatic blend contains 33% Pinot Gris, 33% Gewurztraminer and 33% Riesling. The Pinot Gris and Gewürztraminer were co-fermented in a seasoned French oak barrel after whole cluster pressing. The Riesling was fermented in a stainless steel tank to retain its crisp zesty aromas. The resulting wine is an unusual mouth-watering concert of abundant aromas, with each varietal contributing its fair share without hiding one another. The barrel aged portion produces a very lush palate, while the stainless steel tank provides bright fresh acidity with a medium sweet finish.
and
The Morning After - Pinot Rosé
After the success of our first Rosé “The Unexpected Guest” in 2013 and also to answer the many requests we had from our customers, here is “The Morning After” Pinot Rosé. Destemmed and foot crushed, this wine underwent an overnight cold soaking to extract subtle flavours, colours and aromas from the skins. The morning after, we gently pressed it to avoid extracting harsh tannins and other undesirables. Coolly-fermented in a stainless steel tank, this wine boasts aromas of watermelon and wild strawberries. With an off-dry style, this wine is very versatile and can be enjoyed at any time. Try it with a summer fruit salad and you will see Rosé in a different way!
And other news, this year for the first time Rimu Grove is making a Reserve Chardonnay and Reserve Pinot Noir. Both are still in barrel and are tasting downright incredible. We are planning to bottle them in March 2015 after 24 months in oak, and are so excited about them we can hardly contain ourselves. These wines, when they eventually do emerge from the winery, will be Rimu Grove Pinot Noir and Rimu Grove Chardonnay taken to a new level!
That’s all for now. Please feel free to drop round the cellar door to taste our new releases, or if you can’t make it, order a bottle here. Remember there’s no shipping charge on orders of 6 bottles or more.
All the best for a great summer!
The Crew at Rimu Grove
May 2014
Welcome to the bright shiny new Rimu Grove website!! After years living behind the times, we’ve finally entered the modern world with a fancy, multiplatform website, online ordering and all the other new-fangled gadgets that go along with this day and age. It’s been a work in progress for quite a while now, and like a good wine, it’s been well worth the wait. Special thanks go out to Lukas Sivak for designing the site, writing our words for us and drawing all our drawings. Special thanks also to Jessica Nelson for all the awesome photographs taken over the last 6 months. And of course to Ben, Scott, Steph and the team at Digital Promotions in Nelson for coding it all up for us (and putting up with our endless requests for tweaks and refinements). Have a browse around… we hope you enjoy.
And in other news… Harvest is finished!!
2014 marks the 15th harvest at Rimu Grove. And with 15 years of wine making under his belt, we are starting to suspect that Rimu Grove’s owner and winemaker Patrick Stowe might be starting to get the hang of this (just don’t tell him we said that). Anyway, we won’t bore you all with technical information about the harvest, suffice to say that 2014 was a goodie, the weather held out just long enough for us to get everything picked, the grapes we harvested were rich, ripe and packed with flavour. The winery currently smells amazing… and is packed to the gills with lovely barrels of goodness.
But most importantly we all survived. Wet, cold, sticky, sunburnt, steamy, sleep-deprived, dirty, giddy, hot, sore, tipsy, bone-tired and bee-stung though we were… we all made it in the end!! Special thanks of course to our entire crew; the sexy snip-wielding pickers, bright-eyed yellow-bin jugglers, early-morning net-lifting ninjas, long-legged grape stompers, harmonica-playing bluesmen, quad-bike trailer-surfing madmen, late-night press-pilots and all the other awesome peeps that kept up a constant barrage of banter and laugher while working like demons to bring us the Rimu Grove wines we’ve come to know and cherish (as well as a few special treats, new in 2014… shhh…).
We would also like to thank Hop Federation of Riwaka for keeping us hydrated with hoppiness, Annette Sivak of Mapua for keeping us all fed with a seemingly endless stream of delicious home backed muffins and gorgeous hearty meals. And of course, thanks go out to Gort Forshaw for providing the winery with live blues performances as well as for crafting another ambrosial Gewürz for us.
And now we’re going to have a well-deserved rest and catch up on some sleep while we shift gears and get ready to start the winter pruning.
All the best from the Crew at Rimu Grove.
