Winemaker Notes
Escarpment Kupe Pinot Noir is a beautiful ruby red color. A wonderful example of new world Pinot Noir showing great fruit, complexity and structure. It is at the vanguard of Pinot noir style in the New World and should age gracefully for up to 10 years.
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
Heady, spicy and rich with black cherries and fruit cake; generous but not flashy – no hard edges and consummate balance. Best cellared despite immediate charms.
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Wine Spectator
Complex, concentrated and intriguing, with fleshy blackberry and plum flavors at the core, showing highlights of black walnut, sandalwood, dried pine needle, black pepper and musky Darjeeling tea. The tannins are refined and plush, and the finish is epic. Drink now through 2030.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Medium ruby purple colored, the 2013 Kupe Pinot Noir has a youthfully muted nose revealing suggestions of black berries plus whiffs of charcoal, bay leaf, lavender and dusty earth. Medium-bodied, taut and firmly textured at this early stage, it gives gentle mineral laced black fruit flavors and has very good persistence.
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James Suckling
A juicy and tannic red with plenty of berry, new oak, and smoky aromas and flavours. Full-bodied with strawberry and cherry. Chewy and a little dry.
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.