Winemaker Notes
There is a light charred oak note present, easily confused with toasted almonds. Flowery scents like cherry blossom, violets and Christmas lilies are combined with plums, boysenberry and licorice. Immediately the nose reveals this to be a serious wine: very coherent with rapidly expanding boundaries bringing aromatic volume.
The palate, too, has an escalating horizon and an inflating edge; it's simply delicious, with well-rounded tannins. Initially there is a juicy, plush elegance, with the tannins claiming a more authoritative and luxurious presence, showing off its class and flamboyance. The mid-palate brings the wine back to earth with a grounding acidity that reigns the wine in again without overpowering the fruit weight. It is just enough to bring life again to the floral and lighter fruit aromatics, to highlight the central core and to show the length and smooth finish on the back palate. This is a thought-provoking wine that occupies all spaces and has aroused our excitement tremendously.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Dry River's 2018 Pinot Noir boasts scents of earth, cola and plum. It's plush and atypically soft on the medium-bodied palate—no doubt the product of a warm vintage—which makes it approachable now, yet it appears to have the concentration required to age gracefully for up to a decade.
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.