Ceres Wines

Weather first, then the fruit

Vineyard by vineyard, Matt Dicey reads Pinot Noir as winemaker at Ceres Wines in Cromwell, working from Bannockburn fruit and Central Otago weather. The station suits him because it does not allow a fixed recipe. Central Otago gives heat, cold, light and pressure in different proportions each season, and Dicey speaks of the place as something to answer. “One constant about climate is it is never constant, it is always challenging here (in Central Otago) so we have to be able to adapt and react, utilising past experience to manage that.” The sentence is practical rather than romantic. It puts memory beside reaction, and gives the vintage the first word. Dicey is a fourth-generation vigneron, with a lifelong association with the wine industry and a family name already set into Bannockburn’s winegrowing. Before 2021 he was head winemaker at Mt Difficulty, also in Bannockburn; at Ceres Wines, the work stays in the same Central Otago orbit, closer to the family’s small-batch language and to the named sites that carry the bottlings.

Composition from three vineyards

The Ceres Composition makes the method plain. Dicey draws the wine from the best fruit from Swansong, Inlet and Black Rabbit vineyards each harvest, treating the blend as a record of the year rather than a house style imposed over it. Pinot Noir is the central discipline, but the cellar also works with Riesling, Pinot Gris and Chardonnay, a small portfolio suited to Central Otago’s cool-climate range. The Artists Collection Inlet Vineyard Pinot Noir 2016 narrows the frame to a single vineyard and vintage. The Ceres Black Rabbit Riesling 2018 does the same for Riesling, keeping Black Rabbit visible as more than one part of the Composition. Ceres Wines received the IWSC Bouchard Finlayson Pinot Noir Trophy in 2013, an award tied to the variety that anchors Dicey’s bench-side decisions. The house also works with practical formats, including 2L cask wines, without moving the attention away from site, harvest and fruit.

A quiet cellar door on Cairnmuir Road

The tasting room at Ceres Wines is small, quiet and direct, set on Cairnmuir Road in Bannockburn with vineyard land around it and the Cromwell Basin beyond. It is not a room built to overwhelm the glass. The pace is intimate enough for a guided tasting to stay close to the wine program: Pinot Noir beside Riesling, Pinot Gris or Chardonnay, each held against the season that made it. The cellar door’s restraint matters because the wines are already carrying several kinds of place, from the broader Central Otago climate to vineyards named on the label. In that room, the work reduces to pour, pause and return. Swansong, Inlet and Black Rabbit are not decorative names there; they are the map behind Ceres Composition.