Winemaker Notes
Elegance and power is Decibel;s mantra with this wine each vintage and this one is no exception. Dark, juicy fruit is complemented with savory notes and heaps of character.
This is the wine for a dinner with friends and family, it suits a wide variety of dishes and is a wine even your non-red drinkers can get behind.
Professional Ratings
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Vinous
A sexy, broody style with pretty floral aromas providing the top notes, rich, savory bass notes and ripe plum fruit sitting in the middle register. Sourced from a dry-farmed, organic three-hectare site in Martinborough township. The 2018 harvest was affected by rain, but they kept the fruit hanging to dry and picked over three weeks, and the season's challenges have been overcome. This offers delightful supple texture while gorgeous savory, fine-grained tannins leave you licking your mouth. The lengthy finish provides a smoky, spicy, savory fragrance.
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Wine Spectator
Detailed, with rose petal, dried lavender, white pepper and thyme notes that are fragrant and expressive. Firm, dense tannins, finishing with spice and tobacco accents. Drink now through 2030.
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.