Corney & Barrow 

‘Hand-crafted… no compromise’ is the maxim behind the exceptional, elegant wines of Muddy Water, a small family-owned wine estate on New Zealand’s South Island near Canterbury. Jane and Michael East settled here in the Waipara wine region in 1993 with a dream: ‘the world according to Muddy Water should be a cleaner, purer place where wine isn’t made to formula but grown and fermented to best reflect the vineyard and season’. This sums up the holistic Muddy Water approach, in the vineyard and the winery alike, both run according to organic and now biodynamic principles, aiming to maximise wine quality and long-term sustainability. The Waipara wine region boasts ideal grape-growing conditions: drenched in sunlight and protected from cool sea breezes by coastal hills, its warm summers, luminous autumns and distinctive limestone soils give ripe grapes with intense flavours yet fine acidities.

Photo: Muddy Water estate