Why "shape and feel" matter more to Rippon's Nick Mills than "smells and flavours"

For Rippon’s Nick Mills, place is everything. He’s part of the fourth generation of his family to live and work on the farm his great-grandfather, Percy Sargood, bought on the banks of Lake Wānaka in 1912; a place which has shaped, among many things, the way he makes and thinks about wine.

Since the beginning, the family have let the land guide their farming decisions, experimenting with a variety of crops, animals, flowers and fruit trees, and then cultivating those that thrive. When Nick’s father, Rolfe Mills, decided to pursue viticulture in the early 1980s, around 25 to 30 grape varieties and selections (“I think it was pretty much everything he could find in the country!”) made up the initial plantings. Cuttings from the best performing were then used to establish new blocks. 

“Decisions were made on what was most comfortable in the site,” Nick says. “What doesn’t need pushing or pulling? What doesn't need adjustments to the must – sugar, water, acid, nutrients? What's showing the best vine architecture, the best bunch architecture, all that stuff. That's what we were led by; they had to be able to fend for themselves in vine, but also in wine.

Rippon, on the banks of Lake Wānaka in Central Otago.

“Over the years, because of the quality, more pinot noir cuttings were taken (and planted) than any other variety,” he adds, the grape floating to the top organically. Today, it accounts for 10 of Rippon’s 14ha of certified-biodynamically farmed vineyards, with riesling, gewürztraminer, sauvignon blanc, and osteiner rounding out the rest. 

Even after four years living and working in Burgundy (including at the famed Domaine de la Romanée-Conti), this patch of dirt in Central Otago is still Nick’s greatest guide and teacher. To produce wines that speak clearly and specifically of Rippon and its schistous soils means most the work is done in the vineyard, driving energy into the dry matter, or what Nick calls “the truth of the wine” – namely the seeds (“the prospective progeny”), but also the skins and stems – to build “shape and feel” rather than “smells and flavours”. 

“For me, if I'm drawn to trying to help this land reach its potential and express that potential through wine, I don't care about the smells and flavours,” he says. “They're important, they're attractive, they bring people to the wine, but I’m much more interested in the genetic information over the attraction factors.

“You can't taste or smell a seed. It's a texture, it's a tannin, it's a shape,” he continues. “The difference between Vosne-Romanée and Nuits-Saint-Georges, for example, is not cherries and plums. Same with our Tinker’s Field and Emma's Block – the difference is not flavours and smells, but the shape and feel of the wine.” 

Nick Mills.

In the winery, to solubilise that dry matter into the wine, he chooses “wild and warm autolytic ferments” and a slightly oxidative environment, with between 30 to 35 per cent whole bunch. The wines then typically spend 18 months, or two winters, in barrel – 15 per cent new oak in the first year, then neutral for the second winter – are bottled unfined and unfiltered, and then released up to two years later.

The result is a suite of precise and detailed wines, full of fruit but defined by their structure and tannin articulation. “My loyalty is to our singular piece of land and the raw material of that land,” Nick says. 

“Some people say that winemaking is an art, and it can be, but for us, it’s more of a craft. It’s deferring to the raw material, to understanding the soils and what's underfoot, to standing behind the fruit, and trying to guide all that through a natural secondary process into an inert vessel and not get in the way too much. And that's the interest, that's the craft.”

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