Nick Mills' Rippon Pinots can appear a bit austere and taut when they're young as he refuses to bow to the trend for earlier drinking styles and is unrelenting in his aim to produce terroir expressive wines built to age. These wines really open-up after a few years in bottle, developing gracefully into some of the longest living Pinots coming out of New Zealand. Though this estate may be somewhat under the mainstream radar, it comes highly recommended by me! Lisa Perrotti-Brown, RobertParker.com

It was only when I looked around the table that I knew for certain this was what everyone else saw too: that the paradox of a great pinot is that it is virtually impossible to produce but exudes an air of perfect ease. That’s why the only way to taste pinot is to put your brain to one side and respond with your most atavistic emotions. I was thinking about this recently as I tasted the pinot noirs made by Nick Mills, an earnest, detail-obsessed winemaker from New Zealand. Mills grew up in the vineyards – ''I helped to plant them as a boy’’ – and before immersing himself in wine as an adult spent five years as a competitive skier on the New Zealand ski team. ''Then I blew my knee four months before the 1998 Olympics, going at a control gate far too fast,’’ he explained. ''Oh, I had a far nastier accident the year after,’ he continued cheerfully, ''that’s when I split my kidney in half… there was blood everywhere and…’’ All right, that’s enough. It’s fair to say that Mills wasn’t exactly coming across as a dreamer, but then I got him on pinot noir and he went a bit funny, just like everyone else. ''I’m not trying to make a pinot noir, I’m trying to deliver a pinot noir from the site. The main thing is to make it into something that’s not pinot noir.’’ Like de Villaine, he’s talking about ghosts again, and the grape’s ability, as its vines grow older and as the wine it makes ages, to conjure a part of the landscape in the glass. Victoria Moore, The Daily Telegraph