Rippon is the vineyard on the postcard, and the thing that makes the wine is not the view. It is the schist underneath it and the family that has stayed put. The Mills family has farmed this ground since 1912. Rolfe Mills planted thirty experimental varieties in 1975 after seeing the schist slopes of the Douro during his naval service, narrowed the field over the following years, and with his wife Lois committed the first commercial block in 1982. The first vintage was released in 1989, at a time when respected New Zealand writers were still questioning whether Central Otago could ripen fruit commercially at all.
Their son Nick took over the cellar in 2003 and began converting the property to biodynamics immediately. It is now certified by both Demeter and BioGro. Fifteen hectares running down to the lake, dry-farmed, hand-worked, and own-rooted, which is rare anywhere in the New World and genuinely unusual at this scale. Some of these vines have been in the ground since 1986 and have never known a rootstock or a dripper.
The house style is quiet. These are not wines that try to impress you in the first ten seconds. They are built on texture, line and length, and they reward a decade in the cellar more reliably than almost anything else coming out of New Zealand. Which is the argument for tasting the new releases alongside older bottles rather than on their own.
