Escarpment Kupe Pinot Noir 2020
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Suckling
James -
Spectator
Wine -
Enthusiast
Wine
Product Details
Your Rating
Somm Note
Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Intensely spicy and perfumed with concentrated notes of purple plums, cherry stones, rosemary, neroli, cloves, cigar box and ground coffee. The tannins are firm and tightly-knit, providing a solid frame to the dark fruit. Sensual and distinctive.
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Wine Spectator
A stunning wine, opening up with fleshy black cherry, pomegranate and blood orange flavors that show perfumed details of green cardamom seed and dried violet. The tannins are dense, but also thick and velvety, giving plenty of traction to the long, expressive finish, where notes of malty Assam black tea and forest floor linger.
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Wine Enthusiast
This is a big, austere Pinot that needs time. At the moment, it shows vineyard-floor characters, along with mint, cedar, dark chocolate and toasty oak. The cherry and cranberry fruit is almost an afterthought. The palate is tightly wound in chiseled, chalky tannins. With time in glass to aerate, the tangy fruit creeps to the fore. Structured for the long haul, this should start to reveal more of its charms in another few years.
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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.