Alan Granville Stuff | June 25, 2025
A Martinborough vineyard is toasting its success after being awarded a prestigious ‘Best in Show’ honour at this year’s Decanter World Wine Awards.
Craggy Range’s 2024 pinot noir was the only wine from New Zealand to get the top honour.
More than 200 judges tasted thousands of wines from 57 countries and only the top 50 get a Best in Show award. That amounts to just 0.3% of all wines tasted.
Craggy Range chief winemaker Ben Tombs called it a “fantastic” achievement.
“It is the most influential wine awards in the world,” he told Stuff Travel.
“It’s an awesome accolade to have. It goes towards our ambition … to stand along the great wine estates of the world. So it gives you a lot of confidence.”
The judges hailed the pinot noir as “an uncompromisingly dark wine that plays to New Zealand’s strengths in terms of purity and vivacity of fruit: raspberry, cherry and plum come streaming from the glass, and the fine meshing of fruit and oak in this wine adds to its lustre and appeal”.
Craggy Range
“In the mouth, the wine is both long and broad but not in any way clumsy, and the fruit flavours (raspberry to the fore again) are hypnotic.“
Tombs said the 2024 vintage in Martinborough is “really strong and unique”: “It was quite a warm and dry summer period, and you had these really small berries that gave heaps of concentration.”
He added the vintage was “pretty iconic” and “it just translated all the way through to wine … into the glass”.
Tombs said the award is a big boost for the area.
“It’s special for Martinborough as well. We’re a tiny little region. It’s only 500 hectares of actual pinot noir that’s planted, which is minuscule in the scheme of it.
“So to have that award for Martinborough is incredible.”
Globally, New Zealand finished 11th with a total of 303 medals when all the Best in Show, platinum, gold, silver and bronze awards are handed out by Decanter. France, Italy and Spain were the top three countries.
But where Aotearoa comes into its own is when the results were broken down by the number of medals earned relative to a country’s vineyard area and wine production volume.
It’s similar to the Olympics when a country’s medal tally is rated by population rather than the total number of podium places.
Decanter’s two key indicators are:
- Medals per 1000 hectares of vineyard (kha) – showcasing quality output relative to land.
- Medals per million hectolitres of wine (mhl) – indicating how much of a country’s production reaches an award-winning standard.
Here, New Zealand finished second in the world, with 2.94 medals/kha and 84.2 medals/mhl.
Judges wrote: “Despite its modest size, the country achieved 303 medals from just 3.6 million hectolitres of wine – an extraordinary concentration of quality.”
Greece finished top of this metric.
As for who will win next year, Tombs is expecting something special from both Craggy Range vineyards in Martinborough and Hawke’s Bay.
“2025 is shaping up to be quite, quite different, but really strong again. It’s a different flavour profile. It was actually quite overcast throughout summer, so we’ve actually got some really more savoury pinot this year.
“But in Hawke’s Bay, chardonnay is a standout.”
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