Winemaker Notes
This Martinborough Pinot Noir is made from grapes grown on the alluvial gravel terraces for which the district has become famous. The season was exceptionally warm allowing high quality, fully ripe fruit to be harvested early with brilliant ripe cherry flavors.
Professional Ratings
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Wine & Spirits
BEST BUY. From Larry McKenna's vineyard, Over the Edge is his more affordable line of wines. This needs a day of air to get past its funky vegetal tones and emphasize the brighter raspberry flavors of the fruit. It's layered and intense, a spicy, earthy pinot noir to cellar for several years. Once matured, it will match brisket.
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.