Wine rack: breaking away from Bordeaux.

• Author: Clarke, Jim

The Wines of Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, have a character of their own

We all want to be like Bordeaux. Even last year, 30 years after some Napa wines beat out Bordeaux's best in an expert blind tasting now known as the Tasting of Paris, a newish Napa producer called Vineyard 7 and 8 arranged a similar blind tasting of its own wine, hoping to show that it was of equal pedigree to top-rank Bordeauxs. The results were mixed. In addition, a 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon from Stags Leap Wine Cellars in Napa took first prize in the Paris tasting. (Incidentally, that was the same year that the Hargraves began planting winegrapes on the North Fork.)

The East End's vinous potential has been compared to Bordeaux, for reasons both plausible and less so. Both areas enjoy a maritime climate, and those ocean breezes help moderate temperatures so that grapes can ripen evenly and well. Plausible. It's occasionally argued that we're at the same latitude as Bordeaux, and therefore should be able to make the same sorts of wines. Less plausible--in fact, it's a lie. Latitudinally-speaking, we are about as close to Bordeaux as we are to Tangiers, Morocco. The...