Shifting NZ from Wool to Wine

Two decades ago, you had to explain New Zealand Pinot Noir. Today the world asks for it by name. The numbers behind that shift are an astounding story of growth.

In 2005, New Zealand sold around NZ$435 million of wine to the world. In 2025, it sold NZ$2.10 billion, around 90 per cent of it overseas. In plain terms, the country now earns close to five times as much from wine in a single year as it did twenty years ago. The vineyards tell the same story: about 7,400 hectares of vines in 1997, more than 37,000 by 2017. Five times the land under vine in a single generation.

The tipping point came in 2008. For the first time, wine out-earned wool. A country that had spent a century clothing the world was now, quietly, pouring it a drink. And Pinot Noir, of all the grapes, sits near the heart of it. It is now our second most exported wine, after Sauvignon Blanc.

Why Pinot, of all things

This is the strange part. Pinot Noir is the grape least likely to make anyone's fortune. Thin-skinned, prone to rot, fussy about heat, quick to turn from sublime to forgettable. Growers in Burgundy have spent centuries learning to live with its moods. It is not the grape you plant if you want an easy life.

But it turns out New Zealand is built for its demands. Pinot wants a cool climate, a long slow autumn, bright days and cold nights, and soil that drains hard and gives nothing away. From Martinborough's old river terraces to the schist and glacial gravels of Central Otago, that is precisely what it finds here. The fruit ripens slowly and holds its acidity, which is the difference between a Pinot that tastes of somewhere and one that tastes of nothing.

In wine terms, all of this is recent. New Zealand's first Pinot vines went into the Wairarapa in 1883, but the modern industry barely existed until the 1970s. Marlborough, now a household name, had its first modern vines planted in 1973. The Pinot that turns up on wine lists from London to Seoul is, in vine years, barely a generation old. We are still, in a sense, at the beginning.

A piece of industry lore captures how new it all is. In the 1970s, a cutting of Pinot Noir, said to have come from one of Burgundy's most famous vineyards, was smuggled into the country and confiscated at the border by a customs officer who happened to be a winemaker himself. He recognised what he was holding, sent it quietly through quarantine, and that single clone, still known in the trade as the gumboot clone, went on to shape some of New Zealand's finest Pinot.

What to do with a bottle

Pinot is famously good at the table, light enough for delicate food, deep enough for earthy or savoury dishes. A few things that rarely fail: mushrooms, truffles and root vegetables for the savoury side; duck, quail and roast chicken, where the wine's acidity cuts the richness; gentle cheeses like Brie, Camembert and Gruyère, rather than anything very salty or blue; and herbs over heat, since thyme, rosemary and sage suit it where chilli fights it. It is even, unusually for a red, very good with salmon. The rule underneath it all: the lighter the wine, the lighter the dish.

If you have not poured a New Zealand Pinot in a while, it is a good moment to. Browse our New Zealand Pinot Noir and find something special.