The Roulet Magides Family at Clos Ostler
In an old photograph from Peseux, snow rests on the rooftops and a horse stands in the village street, while people look out from the windows above. Across the upper corner are the words “Vins de Neuchâtel, Paul Albert Roulet, Peseux”. For Antonio, Connor and Georges Roulet Magides, this surviving glimpse of their great-great-grandfather’s world gives a face and a place to the winegrowing history they have inherited. Long before the family’s story reached New Zealand, there was already a Roulet following the seasons in Switzerland, growing grapes and putting his name to the wines of his home.
Today, the three Swiss-French brothers continue that story at Clos Ostler, their family’s limestone vineyard estate in the Waitaki Valley of North Otago. Acquired in 2021 through ACG Wines, whose initials stand for Antonio, Connor and Georges, the estate brought together a remarkable landscape, a deeply familiar winegrowing tradition and the opportunity to continue something that others had devoted much of their lives to creating. The brothers recognised its potential for exceptional Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, but their attachment also grew from an admiration for the people who had believed in this remote hillside when there was little to assure them that their faith would be rewarded.
Paul Albert’s connection to wine survives in more than photographs and labels. His vineyard notebooks contain observations spanning 1887 to 1943, recording the progress of seasons through flowering, harvest dates and yields. Those records later contributed to René Sandoz’s 1949 doctoral thesis at the University of Neuchâtel, which examined relationships between temperature and the behaviour of the vine. There is something intimate about that inheritance, the knowledge that an ancestor watched the same small changes, waited through the same uncertainties and recorded what each year had taught him. More than a century later, his descendants are pursuing their own understanding of a vineyard, carrying that attentiveness into a landscape he could scarcely have imagined.
The brothers grew up between Switzerland, Singapore and New Zealand, with European family ties and an upbringing in which exceptional wines were part of a wider understanding of place, patience and tradition. Their family’s involvement with Yarra Yering in Australia dates to 2009, with their father, Richard Magides, a co-owner. Alongside their Swiss heritage and familiarity with Burgundy, that connection helped shape an appreciation of vineyards whose identities deepen over decades. They came to Clos Ostler with exacting expectations, but also with an understanding that the character of a great estate emerges through accumulated knowledge, and that each generation has something to learn before it has something to pass on.
In the Waitaki Valley, they found a story of conviction that had begun well before their arrival. Jim Jerram and Jeff Sinnott started investigating the region’s winegrowing potential in 1998, and the first Pinot Noir vines were planted in 2002. Jim, Anne Jerram and Jeff committed themselves to a place where isolation, wind, frost and an exceptionally cool growing season made the outcome far from certain. The limestone offered a compelling reason to persist, but recognising promise beneath the ground was only the beginning. Bringing a vineyard into being, and continuing to farm it through the difficult early years, required the courage to keep working towards something that others still doubted was possible.
That courage mattered deeply to the Roulet Magides family. By the time the brothers encountered Clos Ostler, the wines were giving substance to the founders’ vision, revealing the depth and distinction that had persuaded them to plant in the first place. Yet the brothers could also see how much dedication lay behind those bottles. Their admiration extended to the vineyard itself, its Burgundian plantings and the stone enclosure built as the vines were established. For a Swiss family familiar with the estates of Burgundy, the clos created an immediate sense of connection, a recognisable expression of belonging translated into the limestone and open country of North Otago.
The enclosure gave physical form to an idea the brothers cherished, a vineyard held together as one place, with its own boundaries, history and character. Within those walls was the work of Jim, Anne and Jeff, and beyond them lay a valley whose possibilities were still unfolding. When the family took on the estate in 2021, Jim and Anne were delighted to see their legacy continued by people who deeply cared about its future. The brothers felt equally fortunate to receive it. Their ambition to bring Clos Ostler further has always carried that awareness of what came before them, and of the trust involved in taking responsibility for a place made possible by someone else’s belief.
The hillside itself explains much of the strength of that attachment. Clos Ostler occupies the tallest and last north-facing hill before the land opens towards the Canterbury plains and the Pacific Ocean, with a limestone escarpment rising above the vineyard and the Waitaki Valley spread below. It is one of the valley’s few limestone hills, a place where the ancient seabed is exposed with extraordinary clarity. Fossilised scallop shells appear throughout the vineyard, their shapes preserved in stones that can be picked up among the vines. Less than three kilometres away, Anatini’s whale fossil offers another glimpse of that vanished sea, while the surrounding fossil reserves place the estate within a much larger geological history.
For the brothers, the richness of this limestone invited an instinctive connection with the great Pinot Noir landscapes of the Côte de Nuits. What held their attention was the way those soils met the particular conditions of the Waitaki, where the growing season unfolds between the mountains and the ocean. Strong westerlies sweep through the valley and help shape a demanding, extended season. When they ease, easterlies from the Pacific bring a maritime influence inland, moderating vineyard temperatures and sustaining the slow progression towards ripeness. Harvest can reach well into May, giving the site one of New Zealand’s longest periods of fruit development and making patience an essential part of farming here.
The family regards that time on the vine as one of Clos Ostler’s most precious attributes. The fruit has a long opportunity to develop flavour and mature skins while retaining the freshness that gives the wines their poise. In the Pinot Noir, the brothers find the aromatic detail, herbal inflections and savoury layers that first persuaded them this hillside could produce something extraordinary. Chardonnay offers another way of exploring the same meeting of limestone and climate, with its own capacity for precision, texture and depth. Their belief in terroir rests on this combination, the conviction that the wines are possible because of the particular place in which the vines grow, and that understanding its demands is the foundation of everything that follows.
Taking on such a vineyard also meant finding people whose knowledge could do justice to it. The brothers researched carefully before engaging viticulturist Timbo Deaker, whose experience they believed would be invaluable in meeting the challenges of the site, together with Sarah-Kate and Dan Dineen, whom they regarded as among the finest winemakers they knew. The family’s winegrowing inheritance and familiarity with exceptional wines gave them a clear ambition. Working with this team gives that ambition the benefit of practical experience, close observation and decisions made in response to the hillside and the season in front of them.
Those decisions begin among dry-grown vines that are tended by hand, with the fruit also harvested by hand. Five Pinot Noir selections, 115, 667, 777, UCD6 and Abel, are kept separate through harvesting and fermentation, allowing their individual characteristics to be understood before the wines are assembled. Such detail matters on an estate where the aim is to reveal the distinctions within a single monopole, a vineyard under one ownership. Further Pinot Noir and Chardonnay were planted in 2024, the year Clos Ostler also produced its first Chardonnay, extending the family’s commitment to both varieties and to learning what each can express on this land.
Production remains small, with some releases amounting to only a few hundred cases and quantities tightly allocated. For those who come to know the wines, that scale creates a close connection with individual vintages, each release representing a finite part of the year’s work on the hillside. Selected collections are presented in wooden cases, with an attention to the experience of receiving and keeping the wines that reflects the family’s own relationship with fine bottles. Their ambition is for Clos Ostler to earn a lasting place in people’s cellars and memories, through wines that reward the anticipation of opening them and the pleasure of sharing them.
Some of the family’s most meaningful encounters with Clos Ostler have taken place in private blind tastings alongside Grand Cru Burgundies they have long admired. On those occasions, wines from this distant Waitaki hillside have been preferred to bottles that helped shape the brothers’ own understanding of greatness. Such experiences have deepened their conviction in the estate and their desire to share it with their European family, allowing relatives who know those old winegrowing landscapes intimately to discover what is possible here. There is a particular joy in bringing that history full circle, offering a wine from New Zealand that can begin a new conversation among people whose love of wine helped inspire the journey.
International recognition has brought the estate’s potential to a wider audience. Caroline’s Pinot Noir 2021 received three trophies at the 2025 International Wine Challenge, including the New Zealand Red Trophy, and EOS Pinot Noir 2022 was awarded Platinum and 97 points at the 2026 Decanter World Wine Awards. These achievements belong within a story that stretches across the founders’ work, the maturing vineyard and the family’s continuing commitment. For the brothers, they strengthen an ambition already deeply held, to keep refining Clos Ostler and to help its wines take their place among New Zealand’s finest.
The future they imagine is measured in generations. Antonio, Connor and Georges want their children and grandchildren to grow up knowing this vineyard, to understand why the wind matters, why harvest sometimes comes so late and why a scallop shell can be found so far from the sea. They hope to pass on the winegrowing traditions that shaped their own lives, together with the knowledge they and their team gather here, so that those who follow can begin with a deeper understanding of the place. Caring for Clos Ostler is a commitment they intend to hold throughout their lives, with the hope that the estate will become as meaningful to their descendants as the family’s Swiss history has become to them.
Perhaps, in time, a photograph of the brothers at Clos Ostler will carry the same quiet significance as the old image from Peseux. Their children may look at it and recognise the beginning of their own memories, the vineyard where they learned the seasons and the hillside their family chose to cherish. By then, the courage of Jim, Anne and Jeff, the inheritance of the Roulet winegrowing traditions and the work of three brothers will have become part of one continuing story, preserved in the land, in the wines and in the people who care for them.
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