Winemaker Notes
Serve with Asian cuisine, Beef Bourgogne or full flavored fish.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Creamy peach, lemon blossom, dried strawberry and cherry aromas that follow through to a medium body. Lovely fresh, balanced and focused tannins that are nicely polished. Just a bit of bitterness at the end, giving it interest.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2022 Pinot Noir is super spicy on the nose, with sumac, blood orange, tobacco, black tea and cherry pip. In the mouth, the wine is light and spicy but intense—the acidity feels like it wraps around the fruit, leading to a fine-boned and red-fruited expression. It's a beauty. Really elegant but structural. The tannins are ductile and focused. I like the grip and pull of the tannins through the finish. It seems to plume with a coal dust, graphite character.
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Wine Spectator
Offers a generous, rich mix of spiced plum, date bread and preserved black cherry, while a hint of roasted beet mingles with fresh earth, spice and toast notes on a velvety frame.
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.