Winemaker Notes
Crimson red with a deep dark core. Lifted and fragrant, offering all the grace and poise Pinot can give, with an alluring charm. This is a wine that is both subtle and beguiling, yet bold and brooding. It is lifted and fragrant with perfume and spice, along with cascading red and black fruits that offer an array offlavorss and complexity. Always evolving in the glass, it has a core of dark fruit with dried porcini mushrooms and cured meat that work in harmony with the floral notes and savory accents. It is the classic iron fist in a velvet glove. A firm tannin profile rounds out the opulent fruit profile to combine excellent texture and reward patience for cellaring up to 20 years.
Match with rich red meats, duck or traditional Christmas lunch with the trimmings.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
A very tannic and crunchy wine with cashmere texture and powerful structure. Rather muscular. Full body. Fantastic depth of fruit. Blackberry with some dried strawberry and orange peel. Needs three or four years to soften. Best after 2027.
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Vinous
The 2021 Kupe is a hugely structured Pinot Noir. In 2021, this wine boasts tiny berries, 50% whole bunches, 28 days on skins and 40% new oak, resulting in a not shy tannic grip. It has masses of intensity with silken red cherry and plum fruit that just about manage to pull off the tannins, but it requires time or a steak. While it has massive substance, the fragrance and freshness carry this wine home. Leave on the wine rack until at least 2025. It'll be better for it.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2021 Kupe Pinot Noir is, true to form, densely muscular, with a rippling, spicy sort of countenance on the nose. There's resin and clove, alpine mint and tapenade, mulberry, damson and satsuma plum. In the mouth, the wine is fleshy, savory and complex, with a ripe, ribald sort of finish—an uptick to the almost corpulent mid-palate. Many will love the density of this wine, the muscle of it. 14% alcohol, sealed under screw cap.
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Decanter
Dark coffee, mocha, spicy plum, with elegant notes of ripe cherries and blackberries. Toasty oak imparts richness, but the fruit is well-suited. Red cherries abound with a beautifully savoury edge that channels pepper and lichen, structured and elegant.
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Wine Enthusiast
This vintage of Kupe, from 24-year-old vines, is dense and somewhat austere at the moment, with notes of cola, jerky, plum, black cherry and spice. The palate is equally reticent: the powerful, dusty tannins and lifted acidity muffling the fruit and spice. While this reviewer would like to see more character and vibrancy now, this should likely evolve with several years or more in the cellar.
Cellar Selection -
Wine Spectator
Restrained yet plump, with salted black licorice, stewed plum and notes of date bread, crushed pine needle and malty Assam black tea. Offers firming tannins that pull the flavors back on the finish, but there's plenty here to admire.
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.