On my last visit to New Zealand, earlier this year, I met the most extraordinary wine producer. Hiro Kusuda, a genial 45-year-old former diplomat, admits that to pursue his dream he and his young family had to subsist for eight years without any income at all. Even today, the total production of Kusuda Wines in Martinborough is but a few hundred cases of Syrah and Pinot Noir a year.

Bob Campbell, a wine writer and Master of Wine, sent me this report of his 2009 harvest. “I visited him over vintage and was witness to the most rigorous grape selection process I have ever seen. A group of Japanese people had flown down at their own expense to pick and sort grapes for Kusuda. They were variously introduced as a poet, a wine school head, an owner of many restaurants, a top sommelier etc. Each berry was inspected for any flaw and removed if not perfect. The process seemed to take several minutes per bunch. Kusuda invited me to compare the taste of a grape with a tiny scar against a perfect berry. I could detect no difference and suggested he make wine from the reject berries and compare it with the mother wine. He explained, ‘Even if there is only 5 per cent difference, it is enough.’”

Here, clearly, is Japanese perfectionism as applied to one of the world’s most pragmatic wine industries. And the resulting wines are truly exceptional.

Kusuda, who went to Japan’s Ivy League Keio university, was introduced to wine by his brother. “It was a cheap Spätlese from the Pfalz but it was an epiphany for me. I never realised alcohol could taste yummy.” He spent 1986 to 1987 backpacking round the world, from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara; en route he met his wife Reiko. His passion for wine followed him through several years as a salaryman and a transfer to the world of diplomacy in 1992. A chance to take some special exams resulted in a privileged life at the Japanese consulate in Sydney. But wine kept calling him and in April 1996 he announced he was quitting to make wine. “Everyone thought I was crazy,” he admits. Was his wife’s family not worried? “Apparently not,” he laughed. “I said that if I failed, I’d support my family by cleaning or as a truck driver.”

The next step was to acquire a proper, international winemaking education, preferably in English. Kusuda applied to Davis in California and Roseworthy in Australia but was not impressed by how much extra they wanted to charge foreign students. Geisenheim in Germany was more welcoming – although when he applied he couldn’t even count in German. With a determination that should by now be evident, he raced through the Geisenheim course and delivered his thesis, on the effect of different sorts of clarification on yeast activity, on December 1 2000, eight days before the birth of his second child.

Kusuda headed for New Zealand to work as an assistant to his friend Kai Schubert, who had been a few years ahead of him at Geisenheim. This led him to the tiny town of Martinborough, which has become a gourmet mecca for North Islanders in spite of a population of not much more than 1,000. He still makes his wine at the Schubert winery but his path has not been smooth. While studying he had done apprenticeships in Australia, Burgundy and toured the Rhône Valley.

He leased a small Pinot Noir vineyard in time for the 2002 vintage. Muirlea Rise vineyard was, unusually, unirrigated and much more densely planted than the New Zealand norm, perfect for his artisanal approach. “[With more than] four or five hectares you have to become a boss and you’re away from tending the vines and racking the wines yourself. If I wanted to be a manager, I’d have stayed with Fujitsu.”

. . .

He made some stunning wine from the Muirlea vineyard in 2002 and 2003 but then the owner died and his lease was cancelled. “I studied law in Japan. I knew I was in a strong position. But I was a newcomer. It’s a small village. It would have been difficult ...”

His next harvest, 2004, was catastrophic. A record 400mm of rain (a year’s worth) fell in a week and Martinborough was cut off for two days. He made just 1,500 bottles of 2004 from Pinot Noir grapes bought from Schubert. One of these bottles was looking particularly fresh and pure when I tasted it in February – a testament to that fastidious sorting. Then the 2005 vintage was even worse, with rain and rot so devastating that even Schubert could not spare him a single grape. He produced nothing.

But just before the 2006 vintage he managed to buy a small vineyard of his own, 1.2 hectares (3 acres) of well-tended Syrah planted in the early 1990s – pre-history in terms of New Zealand Syrah – on the corner of Cambridge Road and the incongruously named New York Street. And he continues to buy in Pinot Noir grapes. I tasted two wines made in the 2006, 2007 and 2008 vintages and thought that not only were the 2006s unusually fine but both wines seemed to get better with each vintage.

Unfortunately, the 2007 vintage was shrunk by frost and even the 2008 vintage, a generous one for Kusuda Wines, produced a mere 3,600 bottles of each wine – just enough to supply the local market and Kusuda’s few customers in Japan.

Certainly the house that the Kusuda family of four lives in is very modest, even if the wood gleams with an especially Japanese lustre.

When I visited they had a Japanese student winemaker living en famille and I have a feeling that there are usually more than four pairs of shoes to be found at the door. When I asked Kusuda how on earth they had managed, he said that he had accumulated some savings and, after Geisenheim, had actively sought backing from friends and family in Japan.

“I’m not proud that I had no income for so long,” he told me. But as the whole family sat round silently watching me taste the full range of his wines from perfectly polished Riedel glasses, I could feel their pride radiating.

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