2024 Pegasus Bay Bel Canto Dry Riesling, Waipara

The 2024 Bel Canto Dry Riesling leads with sweet pouch tobacco, dried herbs/straw, crushed limestone and smoke. In the mouth, the wine is ripe, spicy (this feels driven by alcohol) and powerful. This is an intense wine that is packed to the rafters with ripe fruit, structural phenolics, texture and explosive length. It has notes of nuts, ginger, apricot kernel—kaleidoscopic in its impact. This is a Riesling worth crossing any ocean for. Drink to 2034.

95 points Erin Larkin for The Wine Advocate, June 2026

Very perfumed with lemon peel, lime zest and orange blossom, this is a powerful, flavoursome off-dry riesling with classical proportions. There is a grainy phenolic grip and pithiness to balance the tingling acidity and touch of sweetness, all tightly wound around each other on the long finish. This can be enjoyed now but will easily age for a decade or more. Drink to 2039.

95 points Stephen Wong for The Real Review, December 2025

Orange blossoms, sliced oranges and lemon peel as well as pears. Full-bodied, creamy and layered with ginseng and lemon at the end. This is harvested very late, giving it some botrytis. Released in Spring 2025. Drink or hold.

93 points James Suckling, November 2024

Bel Canto is a complex premium Riesling with powerful and concentrated fruit that expands on the palate. From the near perfect 2024 season, this vintage presents with a balanced 6.7g/L residual sugar to off-set its 5.8g/L total acidity.

In Germanic cultures, a wine like this would have traditionally been labelled ‘trocken’ Spätlese [ed. dry late harvest] and served with some bottle age to charcuterie, terrines and various hot or cold white meat dishes.

About this producer

Planted from 1985 onwards, the Pegasus Bay vineyard sits in Waipara Valley, a 45-minute drive north of Christchurch on New Zealand’s South Island. It enjoys protection from the Pacific’s easterly breezes, a prolonged ripening period with substantial diurnal temperature variations. The alluvial Glasnevin gravel soils here are free draining and low in fertility, resulting in naturally reduced vine vigour.

The Donaldson family, viticultural pioneers in the region, remain the owner-operators of Pegasus Bay. Minimal intervention at all stages from vine to bottle typifies the winemaking approach: sustainable viticultural management, low crop levels, minimal handling of fruit, natural malolactic fermentation and clarification by settling, without the use of fining agents. All wines are made from estate grown fruit.