Escarpment Kiwa Pinot Noir 2013
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Product Details
Your Rating
Somm Note
Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Showing very well after this amount of time in the bottle with dried strawberry, bark and seaweed aromas and flavors. Umami. Medium-bodied, tight and tannic that runs the length of the wine.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Medium ruby-purple colored, the 2013 Kiwa Pinot Noir has a nose of mulberries, red plums and red currants with suggestions of cinnamon stick and wild thyme. Medium-bodied, it offers layers of earth and dried herb flavors complimenting the red berry character and framed by chewy tannins, finishing long.
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Wine Enthusiast
This wine shows a bit of brown-sugar-inflected oak at the moment, along with hints of cola, menthol and vanilla. Cocoa, cinnamon and cedar notes are all backed by dark cherry fruit and crushed-velvet-textured tannins. Drink now–2023.
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Wine Spectator
Toasted caramel, vanilla and coffee bean notes open up into concentrated kirsch, plum and raspberry flavors, with firm, dense tannins and a mélange of spicy notes on the long finish. Drink now through 2025.
Other Vintages
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Robert
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Escarpment Vineyard was established in 1999 as a joint business venture between Robert & Mem Kirby (of Australia's Village Roadshow) and Larry & Sue McKenna. Collectively, these four directors bring to Escarpment a world of experience, skill and understanding to the nurturing and making of fine, deliciously sublime wine. It goes without saying the impetus behind establishing this vineyard came from the four's deep love for Pinot Noir. Meeting by chance in 1999 through Dr Richard Smith, Larry and Robert quickly hit it off and realised they had more than a love for the grape in common. Serious talk about establishing a definitive New World vineyard began in earnest even then and the 'idea whose time has come' has resulted in one of the most significant vineyard developments in the New Zealand district of Martinborough. Escarpment is accredited with Sustainable Winegrowing New Zealand, an industry initiative directed through New Zealand Winegrowers. With a growing trade and consumer demand for environmentally friendly products, it provides an important platform to promote the New Zealand wine industry as a world leader in clean, green wine production.
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.”
Part of the Wairarapa region in the southern end of the country’s North Island, Martinborough is a bucolic appellation full of artisan, lifestyle wine producers. Above all else, their goals are to tend vineyards for low yields and create wines of supreme quality. Pinot noir is the main grape variety here, occupying over half of the land under vine.
Comparing topography, climate and soils, the region is nearly identical to Marlborough except that it produces top quality reds on the regular.