While the weather scale is tipping towards cooler days and longer nights, we aren’t quite ready to trade the light, crisp notes of a cool glass of white wine in the sun for the richness of a red by the fire. Instead, Jo Cribb inspires us with her top tipples to carry us into the season ahead.

It’s the garnet and golden colours of autumn leaves I like the most. Perhaps because they are the colours of fine aged wine and nature is giving us permission to open a bottle of something special. For me that bottle will be an aromatic white wine. Their intense flavours demand your attention and will shake off the greyest day. Most are fuller bodied and pair well with autumn vegies and comfort food.

Take Albariño. Originally from Northwest Spain, this grape variety makes wines packed full of the flavours of apricots, peaches, lemons and almonds. It’s a recent tasty migrant well suited to the New Zealand climate and our local versions are delicious with lightly spiced food.

Viognier is also becoming more widely available here with good reason. Expect tropical fruit, ginger, and cinnamon. It’s like a fruit crumble in a glass.

Oaked Sauvignon Blanc is another great autumn choice. It delivers the expected citrus and grapefruit aromas with bonus smoky and toasted flavours. Enjoy with your favourite pork chops or cheese platter.

Unfortunately, Chardonnay is a polarising suggestion. I’m a committed member of camp Chardonnay because an oaked and aged bottle with its ripe apples and toasty vanilla flavours is perfect with roast chicken, rosemary, lashings of gravy and roasted vegies. It’s what I hope for on Mother’s Day.

To revive sluggish taste buds, there is no going past Gewürztraminer. These wines are very fragrant with rose petals, lychee, cinnamon, ginger and stone fruit flavours and are best sipped with your favourite curry in front of a roaring fire.

Toast shorter days with a late-harvest dessert wine. Often made from Riesling, the grapes have been left on the vine until they shrivel. While ugly, their flavours are concentrated making sweet wine with intense honeyed apricots, golden peaches, marmalade and lemon curd flavours.

Meet the Maker

Haidee Johnson, winemaker at Halite (ha-light) Wines, didn’t grow up around wine. Like many of us, her early knowledge of wine was the casks in her parents’ fridge. But living in the Hawke’s Bay prompted her to give the industry a go. Several vintages in, in 2018, she won the coveted North Island Young Winemaker of the Year title.

When her young family and full-time winemaking stopped mixing well, Halite (another name for rock salt) was born. Heading into her fourth vintage, based in Martinborough, she focuses on organics and low-intervention winemaking.

Sourcing fruit from organic growers, as a small producer, has been one of her biggest challenges so far but has also allowed her creative freedom. Her cellar, she confesses, is where she feels most at home.

Haidee’s aim is to make unpretentious, tasty ‘salt of the earth’ wines. Her signature Light Dry White is a ‘blanc de noirs’ (a white wine made from black grapes) made from Pinot Noir grown on dry river flats in Martinborough. The wine is indeed light, dry and white, but with a richness that would happily match an autumn feast.

Jo Cribb owns a small vineyard in Martinborough, is on the board of New Zealand Winegrowers, and Chair of Women in Wine NZ. She delights in introducing others to the wide and wonderful world of wine, like Tinder for wine-matching.