It’s been a spectacular success story — one of the most dramatic and consistent ascents in modern wine history. Essentially out of nowhere, beginning around the turn of the millennium, New Zealand wine exports lit the candle and cleared the launchpad. Over the decades since — defying even the crushing effects of the global financial crisis during the late aughts and early 2010s — global wine exports from the remote Oceania nation firmly established their own category on retail shelves and on-premise lists, finally attaining an independent brand separate from the dominant viticultural colossus to its northwest, Australia.