Winemaker Notes
This wine is crimson red with a dark core. It has a lifted, gorgeously opulent aroma that entices Pinot Noir fans. The perfumed red and black fruits show deep red cherry, red currant, raspberry confit, and ripe plum. It also has lifted spice and game notes, along with floral notes of perfumed spring flowers and underlying dried porcini mushrooms. A firm tannin profile rounds out the opulent fruit, providing excellent texture and rewarding patience for cellaring up to 15 years. It pairs well with roast meats or a traditional Christmas lunch with all the trimmings.
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.
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.