Manufacturer: Black Canvas

The Blank Canvas Story Blank Canvas embodies the story of a husband and wife team; international wine-making consultant Matt Thomson, and solicitor turned Master of Wine student Sophie Parker-Thomson. Together they have amassed a phenomenal amount of international experience in all areas of the wine industry. Their collective goal is to create distinctive small-batch, single vineyard wines that reflect the best sub-regional sites in New Zealand. The Blank Canvas philosophy embraces using as little manipulation as possible to uphold, over everything else, the wine’s sense of place. Wine-making influence from Europe is genuine, with both Matt and Sophie undertaking vintage in the Northern Hemisphere every year. “I’ve been working as an international winemaking consultant for over twenty years with some of the best people in the industry,” says Matt. “Over this time I’ve made wines that I am very proud of. Working in a trade I truly love and appreciate makes me very fortunate.” As a young winemaker, like many others starting out, Matt wanted his first wine to be the greatest the world had ever seen. His amassed experience working as a consultant has demonstrated however that great wines are not born overnight from pure cognition. Great wines come from working years with the same vineyards, from trial and error, and from understanding every detail of winemaking. He has learned that a great winemaker knows intimately the vineyards he or she draws fruit from – they recognise the bearing of its microclimate and the nuances of the fruit it yields. This knowledge then gifts that winemaker the tools to express through the wine the precise place it came from. “It is for this reason that we work so closely with our growers and their vineyards,” Sophie explains. “Many of them are rather eccentric, but they are absolutely passionate about producing exceptional quality fruit that they are extremely proud of. Even better, it goes into a single vineyard wine that they can then call their own.” So, Why Blank Canvas? Matt explains, “consulting work, which I love, has allowed me to get where I am today. It has enabled me to accrue extensive experience and knowledge. Having worked over forty vintages in vastly different wine regions around the world, the time to launch my own wine range, together with Sophie, has come. It has been a long-time in the making and we’ve thought long and hard about how to capture the story of us, the special vineyards we draw fruit from and the non-mainstream styles of wine we are striving to create.” Blank Canvas alludes to the fact that as a winemaking consultant, the wines created must be not only the best possible quality, but must suit the stylistic requirements of the client and be ultimately commercially successful. You cannot make the young winemaker’s esoteric wine. “Even if you believe it is the best wine in the world, if it doesn’t sell then you’ve failed. What’s more, you only get one shot each year to present the tangible best from the vineyard. Blank Canvas is an endeavour that is our own expression of winemaking, is from our own funding, and is exclusively our risk.” As someone else once insightfully said, “Blank Canvas is our sand-pit!” “Having a science background allows you to know the parameters of the winemaking canvas, which means you can create and paint right to the very edges.” Blank Canvas is about creating wines that push the sensory boundaries, that challenge the mainstream and that are essentially about enjoyment. We believe regime should not trump sensory enjoyment, nor quality. Both these things are paramount to us. Matt Thomson Matt knew he wanted to be a winemaker from a very early age – 16 in fact. At this time he was already collecting and necessarily stashing cases of wine under his adolescent bed. Bordeaux, Burgundy, and anything of worldly repute that his pocket money could reasonably enable him to possess were searched for and gathered. Accompanying this avid collecting was Matt’s voracious thirst for knowledge: bedtime reading consisted of Parker’s Bordeaux volumes, and when the time for tertiary education dawned on him he fashioned his own degree to most usefully suit a career as an oenologist. Farewelling the University of Otago with a Masters in Biochemistry, Matt began working in the Marlborough wine industry quite fortuitously in 1992. The founding of Kiwi-Oeno, his wine consultancy business, came upon witnessing, and being an active part of, Marlborough’s meteoric rise to international wine stardom. The need for professional oenological support and assistance was manifest has today evolved into a true consultancy collective, KO Wine Consultants, which provides services to wine-regions all around the globe. Aside from the prodigious array of accolades Matt has received for his wines over the years, a professional high-point in his career was winning International White Winemaker of the Year at the International Wine and Spirits Competition in 2008. His expertise and successes in winemaking extend across a sweeping array of varieties with a particular strength in Sauvignon Blanc – this has been assisted by his work as a “flying” (and driving, training, and taxiing) winemaking consultant on behalf of UK importer and distributor Liberty Wines since 1994. This has involved traveling to Europe at least four times annually for the vintage, blending and bottling of wines. This binary oenological existence allows Matt to bring the opposing hemispherical perspective to his winemaking – enabling him to sustain an open-mindedness whatever part of the world he is in. Sophie Parker-Thomson DSC00545 (2)Sophie grew up in a family where wine and hospitality ruled supreme. Her family’s business revolved around the pioneering days of winemaking in New Zealand and some zany ideas. Also a University of Otago graduate, her calling was law, which entertained her writing and public speaking thirsts. Wine and food however never strayed from her heart and it was after living and working in Queenstown and dabbling in wine and restaurant reviews that an opportunity arose to go to Marlborough for the 2011 vintage, working with Kiwi-Oeno. She is currently studying for the Master of Wine qualification, having completed the Wine and Spirits Education Trust Diploma in 2014. She assists Matt in the wine-making of Blank Canvas and manages all other facets from export to marketing. Running a wine business and raising a toddler doesn’t take up a lot of time so pursuing the MW seemed like a good idea!