Babich Marlborough Pinot Noir 2016
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Wine Spectator
Perfumed, with dried lavender and Earl Grey tea details that highlight the charm of this wine. Cranberry and raspberry notes linger on a silky frame. Drink now through 2027.
From their diverse vineyards to your table, Babich wines offer a direct connection to New Zealand, the beautiful country they call home. The love of the craft. Doing things by hand. And caring for the land. They’re all ingredients of Babich's slow, careful process in an ever-changing, always-on world. They wouldn’t have it any other way.
People thought Josip Babich was crazy back in 1912. Planting vines in remote New Zealand, then patiently making wine the difficult way – with vision, thoughtfulness, ingenuity, and true craft. That hard-working spirit is something that still runs deep in their veins today; and they'll keep ‘paying it forward’ for as long as they exist.
Babich will never stop striving to delight wine drinkers and make the everyday extraordinary – so you can taste the care that goes into their wines. From grape, to glass. Every time.
Thin-skinned, finicky and temperamental, Pinot Noir is also one of the most rewarding grapes to grow and remains a labor of love for some of the greatest vignerons in Burgundy. Fairly adaptable but highly reflective of the environment in which it is grown, Pinot Noir prefers a cool climate and requires low yields to achieve high quality. Outside of France, outstanding examples come from in Oregon, California and throughout specific locations in wine-producing world. Somm Secret—André Tchelistcheff, California’s most influential post-Prohibition winemaker decidedly stayed away from the grape, claiming “God made Cabernet. The Devil made Pinot Noir.”
An icon and leading region of New Zealand's distinctive style of Sauvignon blanc, Marlborough has a unique terroir, making it ideal for high quality grape production (of many varieties). Despite some common generalizations, which could be fairly justified given that Marlborough is responsible for 90% of New Zealand's Sauvignon blanc production, the wines from this region are actually anything but homogenous. At the northern tip of New Zealand’s South Island, the vineyards of Marlborough benefit from well-draining, stony soils, a dry, sunny climate and wide temperature fluctuations between day and night, a phenomenon that supports a perfect balance between berry ripeness and acidity.
The region’s king variety, Sauvignon blanc, is beloved for its pungent, aromatic character with notes of exotic tropical fruit, freshly cut grass and green bell pepper along with a refreshing streak of stony minerality. These wines are made in a wide range of styles, and winemakers take advantage of various clones, vineyard sites, fermentation styles, lees-stirring and aging regimens to differentiate their bottlings, one from one another.
Also produced successfully here are fruit-forward Pinot noirs (especially where soils are clay-rich), elegant Riesling, Pinot gris and Gewürztraminer.