Friday, 30 September 2016 07:55

Taste of Japan

Written by  Joelle Thomson
Hiro Kusuda. Hiro Kusuda.

It’s a sunny mid winter day in one of New Zealand’s smallest wine regions when Hiro Kusuda talks about his newest vineyard acquisition.

Hiro bought a 1.6 hectare block of Pinot Noir, the grapes from which are destined to make their way into a wine that retails for $90 to $100, mostly to Japan.

Hiro bought the vineyard this year because he knows it well.

He had purchased the grapes grown on this block from its previous owner, sorting through every single berry individually to discard any that were less than perfect looking. Not that there are always a large number of berries to sort through, this being Martinborough, which is one of the most windy areas in New Zealand.

When it comes to wine, the wind tops the list of the Wairarapa’s pros and cons, followed in swift order by rain, humidity and highly changeable weather patterns, including spring and autumn frosts.

“The wind can be both a con and a pro,” says 52 year old Kusuda, who made his home in Martinborough in 2001 with his wife, Reiko, and two children.
It is not only the thin skinned Pinot Noir grape that is affected by the wind.
“In 2015, a couple of weaker plants in a Syrah vineyard lost about 90% of their canopy because the leaves couldn’t resist the continual shaking by the wind. After a couple of days of shaking they just gave up. That’s an absolute con, but the pro is that the wind is a natural yield control and this can concentrate the intensity of tannins because it reduces both berry and bunch size.”
That said, the wind’s negative impacts on vines in the Wairarapa takes some taming. One of the combative measures that Kusuda uses is vineyard clips.
The use of these is an attempt to keep the vine shoots as parallel as possible so that they are not pushed into the shade, which can prevent efficient photosynthesis, as well as limit the air circulation around grape bunches.

Another yield control, of sorts, is the rigorous sorting of every individual berry, post-harvest.

The idea of berry sorting come partially from Kusuda’s brother, a wine lover and, incidentally, the translator of the first edition of American Robert Parker’s book on Bordeaux into Japanese.

“It became the norm for us to sort every single berry from about 2007 or 2008 vintage. But we began trialling this intensely time consuming practice in 2006 when we had a lot of shrivelled berries and a bit of mould. We decided at the time that the mould may impact on the purity of the wine’s flavour and we tried our best to remove those berries in 2006.”

This time consuming labour of love is not undertaken only by Kusuda himself. He has a growing number of volunteers from Japan – again, thanks to his brother who is a lecturer for the biggest wine school there.

“He has a lot of students. Many have no financial pressure and they have a passion for wine. I have found that the Japanese may be a lot slower at sorting berries than locals, but the level of attention to detail is something I can’t ask for. It’s another one of those things that has its pros and its cons because it takes them so long but it can result in very good quality wine.”

One of the tougher challenges for Kusuda to combat is alcohol levels, which he attempts to address by moving harvest dates forward, when the weather makes this possible.

“I have been successful in being able to limit the alcohol levels in my wines to about 13.5 and sometimes 13, or even less. The challenge is to reduce alcohol levels overall, without getting green wines as a result.”

To date, he has achieved this with experiments on relatively early picking dates of between 7 to 10 days earlier than can be standard in the Wairarapa. He suggests that yield management may be another way of keeping alcohol levels in check.

Like a number of others in the New Zealand wine industry (including Master of Wine Stephen Wong, winemaker John Porter and sommelier-turned-French café owner, Rusty Donworth), Kusuda set out to become a lawyer before having his head turned by wine.

There are no disappointments that he never practiced law, he says, citing the curious case of a cat, a microwave and a law suit in the United States. Without going into all the details, he suggests that being a lawyer means having to tolerate people for whom commonsense is in short supply. He does not see himself as being well suited to that type of role.

Prior to winemaking, he did, however, enjoy a corporate life working for Fujitsu in Sydney with his wife Reiko, who he met in Africa on his backpacker travels in the mid 1980s. That trip also saw him meet a young German from a winemaking family in the Rheingau, and he later studied winemaking at Geisenheim in Germany.

His interest in wine was triggered by his older brother in Tokyo.
“Sake, the Japanese rice wine, was his main focus. He regularly had like minded people to his place and they would drink sake and one night he gave me a glass of white wine, a German Riesling. I sipped it and thought ‘that’s yummy’.
“That was my first encounter and it drove my interest for wine. Up until that point, I never knew alcohol could taste good.”
He was hooked. He then considered studying either the Master of Wine qualification or becoming a winemaker. He chose the latter, working in Burgundy in 1999 and eventually settling in New Zealand in the early 2000s after he had worked in Martinborough for part of his thesis when studying at Geisenheim.

“Kai Schubert hosted me in Martinborough. He was a few years ahead of me at Geisenheim. So I came here and spent about a month, sometimes helping him with harvest and then about three months later he came home to Germany and visited me at Geisenheim, saying that we could come and work there again. In 2001 we came out here with a two and a half month old baby and we have made our home here.”
It was not only the practical connection that cemented his relationship with New Zealand. When living in Sydney he had tasted Ata Rangi Pinot Noir, which he describes as the first Pinot Noir outside Burgundy that he thought tasted like Pinot Noir.
“Since then, the name Martinborough was firmly in my head.”


New Zealand is home now but Japan is the biggest export market for Kusuda Wines. Japan Airlines also carries the wine in first class, although he cannot supply the quantities they would ideally like.
“This is something I wanted to achieve because if you have small production and demand outstrips supply, then you are freed from many marketing and sales pressures. That’s what I wanted to achieve and I don’t want to lose it.”ν

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