Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
Plenty of fresh green details and peppery sage and thyme hints lead the way up front, with gunpowder tea, nutmeg and toasted rye notes mingling with strawberry and cranberry flavors. The tannins are muscular, but never get in the way. The fresh green accents linger. Drink now through 2028.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2017 Block 3 Pinot Noir reveals some slightly herbal notes on the nose, followed by ripe black cherry fruit, hints of dried spices and attractive earthy notes. It's medium-bodied and less tannic and extracted than early versions of the wine, as veteran winemaker Blair Walter has gradually moved toward gentler handing over the years, yet the wine remains flavorful, complex and long.
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Wine & Spirits
Blair Walter finds that the deep soils of Block 3 produce some of Felton Road’s most powerful pinots. Compared to Block 5 (also recommended here), this wine has more fruit sweetness, the flavors ranging from crunchy cherries from a cold cellar to cherry pie. It’s spicy, and long on earthy savor, needing time to integrate the bitterness of the tannins into the fruit.
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.”
Home to the globe’s most southerly vineyards, which are cultivated below the 45th parallel, Central Otago is a true one-of-a-kind wine growing region, but not only because of its extreme location.
Central Otago is more dependent on one single variety than any other region in New Zealand—and it isn’t Sauvignon blanc. They don’t even make Sauvignon blanc there.
Pinot Noir claims nearly 75% of the region’s vineyards with Pinot Gris coming in a far second place and Riesling behind it. This is also New Zealand’s only wine region with a continental climate, giving it more diurnal and seasonal temperature shifts than any other.
The subregion of Bannockburn has enjoyed the most success historically but the area’s exceptional growth has moved to the promising regions of Cromwell/Bendigo and Alexandra districts. Central Otago is known for its fruity and full-bodied Pinot noir. With the freedom to experiment here, growers and winemakers are easily exhibiting the area’s great potential.