Opposites attract

Before Mike Weersing pulled the trigger on the isolated sheep farm in North Canterbury that would become Pyramid Valley, he dug up a little patch of earth and sent a sample to his friend and mentor, the famous French soil scientist Claude Bourguignon.

For 15 years, the Californian-born winemaker and his wife, Claudia Elze Weersing, had been searching all over Europe, the US, Australia and New Zealand for a site with argile calcaire; the clay-limestone combination found in Burgundy’s best vineyards. When Claude asked, after analysing the sample, why he’d sent soil from the limestone-rich scarps of Burgundy, and not from the slopes of Waikari as he claimed, Mike knew they’d found what they’d been looking for.

In late 2017, a few years before Mike passed, the Weersings sold Pyramid Valley to Steve Smith MW, of Craggy Range fame, and American investor Brian Sheth. Last year, Steve decided to dig deeper into this origin story. “Claude confirmed to me that the story was true… but why?” he wondered. “If you put an arrow from Domaine des Lambrays [in Morey-St-Denis] through the middle of the earth, you come out on the outer edge of New Zealand, just south of the Chatham Islands. How can two regions literally on opposite sides of the world share common ground?”

The answer to this initial question is relatively simple. “While the geomorphologies of eastern France and New Zealand are quite different, their tectonic beginnings are remarkably similar,” Steve explained, the limestone-based European Alps and greywacke backbone of Aotearoa both the result of orogenic events that left, within a small bandwidth of latitude, these specific, calcium-rich soils.

But the questions this answer spurred were more complex. Mike was influenced by Burgundy in more ways than argile calcaire. Burgundy was where Mike learned to make wine, studying oenology and viticulture at the Lycée Viticole de Beaune and Dijon’s Université de Bourgogne, before working for several of the region’s esteemed domaines, including Montille, Pousse d’Or and Nicolas Potel. When he planted Pyramid Valley in 2000 – exclusively to pinot noir and chardonnay – it was at a typical Burgundian density of between 10,000 and 12,000 vines per hectare.

Burgundy was also where Mike’s obsession with terroir was fostered, leading to a staunch commitment to biodynamics (Pyramid Valley was the first vineyard in New Zealand farmed biodynamically since inception) and a winemaking philosophy rooted in expression of time and place.

Why then, Steve wondered, with all these similarities in soil and climate and viticulture and winemaking, do the wines from Pyramid Valley, albeit beloved and highly regarded, not share the same reputation as those from the hallowed French wine region? What makes a great wine great? Is it site or celebrity? Are we blinded by the romance attached to Burgundy? Are New Zealand’s vinous efforts undermined by the weight of culture and generational snobbery?

In July ’26, Steve invited 16 wine critics from Australia and New Zealand – me, Halliday tasters Philip Rich and Dave Brookes, Nick Ryan, Max Allen, Andrew Caillard MW, Leanne Altmann, Amanda Yallop, Alex Kirkwood, Cam Douglas MS, Emma Jenkins MW, Jane Skilton MW, Stephen Wong MW, Leah Kirkland, John Saker and Suraj GC – to Christchurch for the first of three global blind-tasting events pitting fine white Burgundy against New Zealand chardonnay.

“We are throwing these questions back to you to try and understand the intrinsic value of fine wine through the transparency of chardonnay,” Steve said.

The blind-tasting, held along the curved bridge inside the striking Christchurch Art Gallery, comprised four flights, arranged by classification and occasion, of notable, well-critiqued chardonnay from the 2023 vintage in Burgundy, alongside 2024 vintage chardonnay from Pyramid Valley and Smith & Sheth – Steve and Brian’s Hawke’s Bay-based label. The wines, kept in identical conditions for a month prior, were decanted into neutral, unlabelled bottles from which exactly 40mls of each were poured. Our task was to score the wine, and decide whether it was from New Zealand or Burgundy. Afterwards, while we refreshed our palates with coffee and ‘Southland sushi’ (the south island’s famous cheese rolls), the results from all four brackets were tallied, then, after a discussion on each flight, revealed.

“The purpose of this tasting is to compare and contrast rather than to arrive with a specific and unified judgment,” Steve said. “However, there is no doubt that we will look at the results (see left) and suggest which was the best wine in each flight.” For winemakers and vignerons, benchmarking against the world’s best is standard practice.

Nonetheless, it takes a great deal of courage to do it publicly, and on this scale. But despite claiming a “reasonable number of sleepless nights” in the lead up, it quickly became clear that Steve’s confidence in his wines was justified.

It was also clear that, even for the finest wine minds across Australia and New Zealand, this was going to be a challenging exercise. When the results of the first flight, comprising five ‘everyday’ wines – think village not cru – were revealed, it was fascinating to see how divided the room was on provenance. Although two-thirds of us correctly guessed that the wine that scored the highest, the Smith & Sheth CRU Heretaunga, was from New Zealand, the group was split down the middle on both the Henri Germain Meursault and the Pyramid Valley Kererū Road.

The divide in the second flight, featuring five wines from cooler regions, was even greater. The style’s trademark high acidity and stony minerality was vividly displayed in the two local expressions but muted in the three from Chablis; richer and riper than expected due to a warmer vintage. As such, there wasn’t a single wine in the lineup whose country of origin the majority correctly picked. We were, however, unanimous in declaring the Pyramid Valley Low Burn the best of the bracket, and by the day’s largest margin – its score of 94.8 was followed by the William Fèvre Les Preuses Grand Cru (93.1), Louis Jadot Grand Cru Les Clos (92.6), Pyramid Valley North Canterbury (92.5), and Moreau-Naudet Grand Cru Valmur (92).

Bracket three, a significant step up in prestige and price point, was again topped by a wine from New Zealand. The Smith & Sheth Quinn (which 80 per cent of us picked as Burgundy), was tied with the Domaine Guffens-Heynen Saint-Véran Clos de Poncetys; both scoring 95.5. Another Smith & Sheth wine, the Howell, came in third, and their Onewa, sixth. Largely though it was a consistent flight, the favourite overall for many in the group.

But for me, it was the final flight, seven wines classified as ‘rare and definitive’, that was the most interesting – and not just because it was littered with elite grand crus. There was more diversity in style, and, to me at least, a more obvious expression of place in each wine. The two from Pyramid Valley, Field of Fire and Lion’s Tooth, both bore a distinctive, cornichon-brine like character, which linked them and marked them as Kiwi. Four tasted like the best Burgundy – as you’d expect from Henri Boillot, Leflaive, Raveneau and Lafon. The last wine, the Smith & Sheth Les Graviers, was the hardest to pick, somehow tasting like the best Burgundy (87 per cent of the group assumed it was) and the best New Zealand chardonnay.

Although it came in third behind the Henri Boillot Corton-Charlemagne Grand Cru and the Leflaive Bâtard-Montrachet Grand Cru, “I’m pretty excited about the result for the Smith & Sheth wine,” Steve said. Made for the first time in 2024, from an irreproducible combination of clones – Gingin, and another “made from a single vine in Montrachet that I selected during my pilgrimage in 1995,” and grown on the estate vineyard in Gimblett Gravels – just one barrel, out of three, made the final selection.

Before we jumped on the bus to make our own pilgrimage to Pyramid Valley’s Waikari vineyard, Emma Jenkins MW asked: “At what point do we move away from comparisons? If we’re talking about place, we should be different, right? And we are, even if most of us can’t tell.”

For Steve, outside of the benchmarking benefits, it’s about visibility rather than comparisons. “It’s not an either/or conversation,” he said. “It’s an and conversation.

“For us to be successful as a fine chardonnay producer, we need to be able to show the world that our wines deserve to be on the same table. We need the people who buy Burgundy from fine wine merchants in London to say ‘I’m also going to buy a six-pack of that New Zealand stuff,’ but for that to happen we’ve got to have visibility.”

After repeat events in London and Vosne-Romanée in September (which were underway at the time of print), the next step for Steve is to redo the tasting in eight to 10 years, with the same wines, this time to assess their ageability. But whatever the outcome, the reality is undeniable: New Zealand chardonnay is absolutely world class.