Thirteen PIWI Varieties Enter New Zealand Quarantine, One of Which Has a Strange History With the Place

Summary

Thirteen PIWI varieties — that’s pilzwiderstandsfähige Rebsorten for the full German, which nobody ever uses — are in quarantine at a Riversun nursery in New Zealand. The article names eight of them: Sauvignon Nepis, Sauvignon Rytos, and Sauvignac on the white side; Pinot Kors, Pinot Iskra, and Voltis for sparkling; Souvignier Gris and Cabernet Blanc. The other five are just not mentioned. For a piece built around the number thirteen, that’s a bit of a hole.

Souvignier Gris needs no introduction at this point. Voltis got approved for use in Champagne in late 2022 — the first disease-resistant variety to make it into a French appellation, capped at five percent and on a ten-year trial. Which is very Champagne, but still.

The real story here is Cabernet Blanc. Valentin Blattner apparently developed it while working in New Zealand, found no takers, and brought it back to Europe, where it eventually caught on. Sam Doncaster — works at Rebschule Freytag in the Pfalz, helped name the variety — explains why it is genuinely unusual: the white gene in Cabernet Sauvignon is recessive, barely ever surfaces in breeding, almost impossible to replicate. The breeding code VB 91-26-1 suggests 1991 as the year of the crossing, which doesn’t quite match the 1980s New Zealand story also in the article. Nobody mentions this. Jim White at Cloudy Bay says there are no Cabernet Blanc vines left in New Zealand today — he has only encountered it from European producers, when Blattner visited in 2024. Trial plots should go in across four or five sites in spring 2027, Marlborough and possibly Central Otago among them. First wines: 2030 at the earliest.

Our take

Boiling is a proper journalist and this reads like one wrote it. He has good sources, he understands what they are telling him, and you can tell he actually cares about this subject rather than just filing copy. The Doncaster material on Cabernet Blanc genetics is the kind of detail that usually gets cut or garbled — here it is the centrepiece, and it holds up.

Where the piece falls short is in the questions it does not ask. Blattner gets to make his case for PIWIs — “sustainability and lower production costs” — without any pushback. Nothing on how these varieties would interact with New Zealand’s appellation system if they ever go mainstream. Nothing on biosecurity beyond the fact that quarantine is happening, which feels like a significant gap for a country that has essentially turned agricultural border control into a national sport. And the Cabernet Blanc origin story is charming, but the dates do not quite add up and nobody presses on it. Still a good piece. Better than most of what gets written about this corner of the wine world. Just could have been sharper.

About the author

Chris Boiling bought a derelict vineyard in Slovenia in 2009, which tells you something about him. He did a wine production degree at Plumpton College, made small batches of wine from obscure varieties in Slovenia, Georgia, and elsewhere, and writes for Decanter, Wine-Searcher, and Imbibe. He also edits Canopy, the International Wine Challenge newsletter. It is an unusual path and it gives his writing a grounded quality — he is not reporting on winemaking from the outside, and it shows. His enthusiasm for the marginal and the overlooked is genuine, which is probably why this particular story landed with him.

About the publisher

Drinks Retailing has been going since 1863, published by Agile Media, aimed at the UK off-trade: supermarket buyers, wholesalers, independents. Solid trade publication, not really in the business of breaking stories or taking risks editorially. This piece is better than its usual run, which probably has more to do with Boiling than with any editorial ambition from the top.