TASMANIA has been Australia’s red-haired stepchild since about forever.

Butt of mainlanders’ jokes, derided by economists as a “mendicant state”, accused of Aboriginal genocide and used by colonists as a dumping ground for convicts, Tasmania hasn’t been able to take a trick since Abel Tasman spotted the island in 1772. The decline of Tasmania’s pipfruit industry has even meant the state losing claim to its long-standing “Apple Isle” slogan.

So stealing the mainland’s crown as the best producer of Australia’s most expensive wine variety must provide more than the usual sense of satisfaction.

Pinot noir costs Australians more than any other variety. Its average price of $17.46 per bottle is 14 per cent higher than the next dearest – pinot gris – and 26 per cent higher than Australia’s most famous variety – shiraz – according to Wine Australia.

It doesn’t stop there, either. Tasmania has become synonymous with the production of Australia’s best sparkling wines. That’s one of the only two wine categories to show any growth in 2023. It was also the producer of the most highly scored chardonnay at Australian wine shows in 2025. Tolpuddle’s 2024 Coal River vineyard chardonnay attended only one wine show last year. But it walked away from the Royal Melbourne Wine Awards with a near-perfect score juggling no fewer than five trophies.

Game changer

There is clearly a lot to love about Tasmanian wine. But it is in pinot noir that the island state thoroughly dominates its mainland competitors.

Australian wine shows assessed more than 2000 pinot noir exhibits last year across nearly 900 individual labels. Exhibitors came from the length and breadth of Australia as winemakers competed for the honour of producing the best example of maybe the industry’s most prestigious variety.

But they didn’t stand a chance if they didn’t come from Tasmania.

Of the top 50 pinot noirs ranked by us from last year’s wine shows, nearly half came from that state. More significantly, every one of Australia’s top 10 pinot noirs came from Tasmania except one. As if to prove the point, a Tasmanian pinot noir also lifted Australia’s most prestigious wine show prize – the Royal Melbourne Wine Awards’ Jimmy Watson Memorial Trophy for the Best Young Red.

None of this comes as a surprise to one senior winemaker and wine show judge.

Tom Carson, general manager and chief winemaker for Yabby Lake, makes pinot noir in both Tasmania and Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. He said the appearance of Tasmanian pinot noirs in wine shows 15 years ago was a game changer.

“I said sort of offhand to someone back then, ‘Nobody’s going to win a pinot noir trophy outside of Tassie again’,” he told mattsays. “Those wines from Tassie - particularly if you get down south….Coal River, Tamar…. they just have incredible colour and power and presence when they’re young. And in the show environment, certainly judging young wines, colour catches the eyes of the judges quite easily. And then you’ve got that concentration of fruit and depth and power that rides along with it. It’s a bit of a battle to get judges to look past the captivating intensity of these wines and try and see what the other wines are offering as well.”

Profound pinot

Carson, who was also the chief judge for the Australian Pinot Challenge last year, put the Tasmanian wines’ dominance down to the island’s climate and latitude.

“The climate - if you go down to Coal River – is a very dry region. It’s quite continental,” he said. “It’s got longer sunshine hours. It doesn’t rain much there. There’s not a lot of cloud. You get a lot of UV there similar to parts of New Zealand in the South Island that also make quite deeply colored and profound pinots. I think that was really something we hadn’t really seen on the Australian mainland was that type of climate that far south in Australia and what it could do. So it was a new aspect to what Australian pinot can be.”

Carson said the regional differences could also be discerned even within Tasmania.

“The colour and tannin out of the Coal River and the surrounds is something unique,” he said. “Up north the wines are a little more red fruited and fragrant in a very general sense and a bit more structured and darker down in that southern section of Tassie. So there is quite a difference I feel when from what I’ve tasted.”

The next best regions outside of Tasmania according to the wine show data are the Yarra Valley and Mornington Peninsula although both play second fiddle to a group of sundry Victorian regions that includes Sunbury, Macedon Ranges and Gippsland.

Carson said the climate variation between the Mornington Peninsula and Tasmania brought different winemaking challenges.

“I think we use a bit more whole bunch on the Mornington when the conditions are right,” he said. “And we’re treading a little bit carefully with that down in Tassie. Getting the ripeness just right is one of the key things to making really good wine and having the patience to pick it on the right day. Down in Tasmania, we were picking in very late April this year in the Coal River and we’d finished pinot on the Mornington weeks before that. So getting the vines and the fruit to exactly where they should be is certainly a challenge. And probably things happen a bit quicker up here on the Mornington than down there.”

Carson said the main Australian pinot noir regions each offered distinctive styles.

“We do lots of blind tastings and the number of times we mess things up between regions and countries is astounding,” he said. “So it’s never easy tasting these things blind but I think if you’ve got very typical examples of them, you could pick the difference.

“Yarra pinots are quite distinct when they’re made well. They’re quite red fruited and they’ve got lovely, silky tannins. When they’re young, they’re just beautifully well balanced.

“Mornington sometimes has a little bit more colour, a little bit more tannin and extract can be a little bit darker and more broody when they’re young and from down the hill. Up the hill, they’re more fragrant and lighter framed. Gippsland is maybe a little bit spicier.”

Burgundy still king

Carson acknowledged that the Adelaide Hills, once a noted producer of the variety, was no longer a reliable producer of its best examples.

“When you compare the Adelaide Hills pinot noirs to the cooler parts of Victoria and Tassie, they probably lack some complexity,” he said. “Some years there it does seem like parts of it are a little bit warm. I think the southern regions in Victoria and Tasmania are producing higher quality pinots than the Adelaide Hills at this point.”

Despite the improvement in Australian pinot noir, Carson believed the local product had not yet achieved the heights of red Burgundy.

“I’ve tasted a lot of Burgundy and I would say with chardonnay we can get eerily close to [their] very best wines,” he said. “But with pinot noir, I think the very top grand crus from the best producers are in a different stratosphere to what we are producing here.

“To appreciate the very best of [red] Burgundy, you have to taste them with some age. That’s when they really show their true quality. And we just don’t have the longevity yet in Australian pinot. To make wines that continue to improve at the very, very top level for 20, 30, 40, 50 years from a good vintage and from the right producer…we don’t make anything that is comparable to that. Those wines at age, from great vintages and great producers are just utterly captivating wines. They’re hauntingly fine and complex and just unbelievably detailed and delicious. I don’t think we get anywhere near that and I’m talking at the absolute top of the top.”

Carson thought the gap was partly explained by the micro-farming scale at which top Burgundy has been grown over a long period.

“Site selection is key,” he said. “An analogy I like is we know the terroir of pinot noir like we can spot the MCG and say, ‘That spot’s pretty good’. In Burgundy, they know every seat.

“And that’s sort of the difference. I’m staring out the window at Yabby Lake. We’ve got a vineyard here. All the land around us is no vineyard. I don’t know whether the best site is just over the hill or 10 meters over the fence into the neighbour’s place because the soil’s slightly different, the slope’s just right and everything’s just perfect. And it’s going to make better wine from that spot. I don’t know that because there’s no vines there. Whereas in Burgundy, you can look everywhere and they’ve got hundreds and hundreds of years of farming the same place. It’s all down to the potential of the site. And that’s what Burgundy is a lesson in.”

Region trumps price

As with other varieties, price offers no reliable guide to quality when it comes to Australian pinot noir. The correlation between the two variables was flat to slightly negative across the Top 50 – which means that paying more generally buys you less quality - and the price band with the best average score was the cheapest of the four (<$40).

Yarra Valley was the most expensive of the major regions to appear in the Top 50 even though its best performer ranked only 13^th. The region ranked third overall by score. Interestingly, this pattern of high prices and middling performance mirrored Yarra Valley’s performance in chardonnay.

Tasmanian pinot noirs were the second-most expensive but that was a better reflection of a region’s importance as the primary determinant of quality instead of price. It was also potentially a reflection of the cost of Tasmanian pinot noir grapes. At $3990/tonne, they were Australia’s second dearest wine grapes in 2025 although it’s hard to know whether that’s cause or effect given the potential demand for them by mainland buyers. Tasmania’s premium compares with $1391 for Victorian pinot noir and $2148 for Western Australian pinot noir. It’s also a hefty margin over Barossa shiraz which attracts just $1938/tonne.

Australia’s most expensive wine grapes? Tasmanian chardonnay.

Our list of Australia’s top pinot noirs of 2025 follows:

Our full list is available exclusively to paid subscribers and appears below:

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GOLD-MINING, bungee jumping, jet boating, skiing and hiking aren’t the usual hallmarks of a great wine-growing region. Let alone one that many nominate as their favorite in a country brimming with worthy alternatives.

But that’s exactly the case for New Zealand’s Central Otago.

According to one major Auckland wine retailer, consumers put Central Otago at the top of their list when it comes to buying New Zealand’s favourite red wine, pinot noir.

A spokesman for Glengarry told mattsays.com the choice appeared to be driven mainly by the region’s “fame” among NZ consumers. This was reflected on the retailer’s shelves with Central Otago pinot noirs outnumbering those from any another NZ region area by a considerable margin.

Great thyme

The allure of New Zealand’s tourism capital and its consequent effect on consumer choice hasn’t escaped other wine industry figures, either.

“The thing about Central Otago is it’s an amazing place,” says Master of Wine Michael Henley. “You get off the plane in Central Otago and you smell the air and you think, ‘Jesus, this is amazing’. And you smell the wine - you think this is amazing. You’re having an amazing time and the wines tastes great. So people love Central Otago.”

Of course, it’s not just the picture-postcard panoramas of lakes and thyme-covered mountain ranges that leave an impression. Henley, who lives in the Hawkes Bay, credits the region’s viticultural pioneers and “incredible winemakers” for making a unique style of wine that resonates with consumers.

Pinot Noir is also Central Otago’s strong suit. Its 1683 hectares of pinot noir plantings dominate the region’s next biggest variety, pinot gris, by a factor of ten. That’s nothing like any of the other main NZ wine regions in each of which pinot noir plays second fiddle at best to other varieties. Even Wairarapa – home to an esteemed pocket of pinot noir in Martinborough – boasts more area under sauvignon blanc than the black grape.

Sub-regional diversity

Perhaps Central Otago’s other advantage over other NZ regions is its sub-regional diversity. While the region is universally regarded as being NZ’s only “continental” climate – or semi-so – its grab-bag of basins, valleys, terraces and glacial moraines offer a variety of different aspects and growing conditions across the area’s Martian landscapes.

Michael Henley said Central Otago pinot noirs were readily identified by their aromatic intensity. However, the area’s signature style was also evolving as it matured.

“The thing about Central Otago, which defines [the region] for me is about purity,” Henley said. “It’s like smelling the mountain air and the wild herbs that grow around it. They are pure style wines.

“But it’s changing. In the past century, Otago pinot used to be all ‘wow’ wines. They used to be wines you’d stick your nose in and just go, ‘Wow, yes, that was incredible….yes!’. And then you taste them and it’ll be packed full of flavour and that sort of Central Otago herb and things - all of those.

“But the winemakers have grown up and they’re changing. They’re starting to say, ‘Hey, you know, maybe we don’t need to be at 14 and 14½ percent alcohol. Maybe we don’t need to get as ripe. And maybe we don’t need to throw as much wood at it. Maybe we can just sort of sit back and just let this site express itself.

“So the wines are becoming a little more subdued…a little bit more elegance to them…a little less extracted. So they’re changing a little bit.”

Blind favourite

All this regional sophistication, consumer appeal and winemaking development should therefore make Central Otago the obvious region to choose when buying a NZ pinot noir.

But not according to the country’s biggest survey of NZ wine quality – the wine show system. Going by its numbers, New Zealand’s best pinot noir region is actually Marlborough. And not by a little but by a lot.

NZ wine shows assessed 420 pinot noir exhibits last year across 300 individual labels.

Although Central Otago dominated the Top 50 wines with nearly half of that tier (23), it was neither the best region, the cheapest, the best value nor provided the top-ranked wine.

Martinborough ranked as the top region by average score and provided two of the top three wines. Its otherwise small presence of only six wines in the Top 50 makes too much statistical inference beyond these observations unreliable.

But all the other accolades sat with Marlborough, which accounted for seven of the Top 10 wines, one-third of the Top 50 and took out first prize for the best wine with a label that sells for just NZD$25.

Size matters

Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise. Marlborough is New Zealand’s biggest wine-growing region after all. Sauvignon blanc remains its biggest variety by far with 12 times as much acreage than pinot noir. Moreover, much of the original pinot noir plantings were destined for sparkling wine production.

But more recent pinot plantings have focused on clones better suited to still wines and Marlborough’s total acreage of pinot noir is now a quarter bigger than Central Otago.

What really separates the two is price. Central Otago, which accounted for just one of the Top 10 with a $49 wine, averaged $45/bottle in the Top 50 list. That compares with Marlborough with an average $30/bottle and the cohort’s lowest median price of just $25.

Still – that’s all a lot cheaper than Glengarry’s Burgundies which it says typically retail for between $80-120 for village-level wines.

The inability of price to predict quality is a familiar theme in the wine show data across Australia and New Zealand. In the case of NZ pinot noir:

• Price does not predict score in the Top 50. Spending more buys you nothing on average.

• The best value lives at the bottom of the price ladder. The cheapest of three price buckets (less than $25) has the highest average score (94.42) and includes the highest ranked wine.

• The most expensive region - Central Otago - (average $45/bottle ranging from $18–$105) has the lowest average score of the four big regions. You pay a premium for the postcode.

• Marlborough is not just the best region by value and price (15 wines have an average price of $30), cheaper wines from within the region actually score better than expensive ones.

• Conversely, Martinborough and Waipara’s small samples are positively correlated for price and scores. Paying more does deliver higher quality in these regions.

Henley said the importance of price, value and quality depended on the experience of the consumer.

“The value-quality ratio is very subjective,” he said. “Someone who goes, ‘Hey, here’s a $50 Pinot…I don’t get that much out of that versus a $20-25 Pinot’ - that’s a very subjective thing. Now we can talk about regional diversity and regional and sub-regional nuances and things….if you are on a journey of wanting to know… a little bit more about this and really want some more detail around it, then probably the story that comes with the more expensive pinot is going to be significantly more interesting.

“The story is going to include provenance and history. It would probably include detail around the vineyard site….maybe it’s a single vineyard, maybe it’s not. I’m generalizing but it’s just going to include more information and it’s going to show, I would hope, more attention. Some people care about that - some people don’t.

“So what are they getting from an extra $25? You’re getting the brand power, I guess, in some things, but you’re getting something that maybe is a little bit more nuanced.”

Hidden charm

Michael Henley said the typical fruit expression of Marlborough pinot noirs helped elevate their profile in wine shows.

“They’re often very, very well fruited,” he said “And the good wine makers balance it … with some lovely oak that doesn’t overpower [them]. It’s definitely there to add structure and things so they’re very well clean and pure fruited wines whereas Central [Otago] is just a little bit more fragrant and perfumed.”

Henley credited Martinborough’s alluvial soils and difficult climate for the success of that region’s pinot noirs.

“They’re a little bit deeper,” he said. “They’re a little bit harder coax out of their shell. You work harder with Martinborough sometimes than you do with, say, Central Otago or Marlborough, which are very giving. And I think that’s part of the charm of Martinborough, to be honest. They’re not gonna just give it to you.”

Despite these apparent differences, Henley said most New Zealand pinot noir drinkers would struggle to separate the regions in a blind tasting.

“If I gave people a whole blind tasting of a series of wines, I don’t think people …would necessarily be able to differentiate because I just don’t think they’re interested. They’re just looking for something yummy,” he said.

“They look for something delicious, and that can come from anywhere. A lot of people do come in [to Henley’s bar] and say, ‘Oh, I want the Central Otago Pinot.’ And you’re like, well, ‘Why?’ ‘Oh, that’s because that’s what I normally like to drink.

“And so to actually ask them to articulate what it is that they are liking about Central Pinot versus Marlborough Pinot versus North Canterbury Pinot - I’m not sure if they could.”

Different strokes

Henley said NZ winemakers no longer looked to pinot noir’s ancestral home in Burgundy as an automatic reference for their wine development.

“New Zealand winemakers - as we get older - we don’t actually talk about Burgundy anymore because they are different places doing different things,” he said.

“New Zealand needs to stand on its own two feet for pinot and be an expression of pinot that is the best expression that it can be irrespective of what Burgundy’s doing.

“And one of the big comparisons you do straight away is, of course, price, irrespective of anything else. You just go, ‘Well, how much? What price are you buying Burgundy at that would be the same [quality]? What would you get from New Zealand for the same price?’

“And I can tell you - because I do this regularly and because I have a couple of Burgundies on my list - that we do a hell of a lot better quality wines than Burgundy does at the same price point.

“New Zealand pinot producers are over comparing themselves to Burgundy. They are quite happy standing on their own two feet now. And so the comparisons, wine wise, are not really there anymore.”

Maybe so. Still, Glengarry’s next biggest pinot noir selection after Central Otago is from Burgundy.

Our list of New Zealand’s Top 20 Pinot Noirs of 2025 follows:

Our full list is available exclusively to paid subscribers and appears below:

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