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Master Winemaker 100: Nikolai St George

08 July 2026 By db staff writer

The winemaking director at New Zealand’s Cloudy Bay features in this year’s Master Winemaker 100 guide. He tells db about enjoying rough edges, knowing when to leave wines alone and where he’d replicate Champagne-style winemaking.

Before he could even buy a bottle, Nikolai St George knew his destiny lay in wine. Leaving his family’s King Country farm aged just 16, he first studied viticulture and winemaking in Gisborne before earning a degree in Australia. From that very first sip of blackberry wine to the vintages he worked across Chile, the US and France, St George has always been driven by a desire to understand what people love to drink – and why. In 2020, he joined Cloudy Bay as senior winemaker, stepping up to the role of winemaking director in 2023. A true outdoorsman, St George is an avid hunter, diver and spearfisherman. Together with his wife Jasmine and their three children, he also runs a strawberry farm.

A wise person once told me to spend more time in the vineyard and less in the winery; it will make your job easier in the long run.

A great wine should be one of a kind. Quality and precision is important; however, tasting something you have never had before is what makes memories.

A great winemaker should know when to stand back and just be patient. Wines tend to work themselves out and reveal who they are if you just let them.

Perfection is boring. I really enjoy wine (and people) with a few rough edges.

The thing I’d most like to change about the wine world is its expectation of perfectly stabilised wines, free from any tartrates or sediment, especially in white wines. We spend a lot of time and energy stabilising wines to ensure they are free from small amounts of sediment or tartrates, but these wines would be better, and we would use less energy, if we could just leave them alone. Te Wāhi is a wine where we can do this, but all our whites we are very careful with.

I wish I could tell the consumer who drinks my wine that they are tasting the work of many, many people. That extends from the Northburn and Calvert vineyards, where everything is meticulously grown with an organic focus, to the winery where the ferments are plunged daily, tanks are dug out by hand, barrels are topped monthly and all the other work that goes into making a wine.

The last time I asked a sommelier for advice, I got a faulty wine (brett). I love trying new wines and wine styles, but I still expect it to pass certain criteria, no matter how it is made. This can be a real turn-off for wine lovers, where trust can be lost and then people regress back to what they know.

If I couldn’t be a winemaker, I’d love to grow things. My weekend time is spent growing hydroponic strawberries and other plants out of season. I enjoy growing plants I can’t find in the supermarket or are not up to the quality they should be. At present I have melons, heirloom tomatoes and peppers.

I wish our vineyards could speak: they would have so many stories. The Northburn vineyard was born from glaciers and gold mining. Many people have walked the land before us and have shaped it to what it is now.

My next ambition is to create something at Cloudy Bay that was not there before me. Whether it’s a new part of the winery or a new wine, my aim is to achieve something lasting that becomes part of Cloudy Bay’s history.

If I won the lottery, I’d blow it all making bubbles in Central Otago. Gibbston Valley has similar growing degree days to Champagne, and I always imagine drilling into the mountains to create storage caves lined with vintage méthode traditionelle.

If there were more hours in the day, I would read more. Just sitting down with a book is a luxury that I have not had for years.

When it’s all going wrong, it’s time to go diving and gain some perspective again. It’s amazing how a day on the water puts things right in my head.

My desert island wine would be probably a Vouvray of some kind like Marc Brédif. The Brédif wines are always clean and bright, with no yeast attenuation. And Vouvray of course goes well with fish!