Winemaker Notes
Dense, dark reddy purple. This Pinot Noir explodes with Black Doris plums and boysenberry fruit, floral notes of violet and earthy, truffle and liquorice overtones. Spice from the French oak barriques are layered with earthy notes and hints of dark chocolate. Pinot Noir on a Harley Davidson! This is a serious wine that will reward a few years in the cellar. It is ripe, concentrated and full bodied, with impressive flavours and plenty of earthy tannins leading to a long, fine, dry finish. Decant 20 minutes prior for ideal drinking.
Professional Ratings
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Tasting Panel
Taylor’s On The Quiet line features limited-release, single-vineyard wines made in small quantities. This one is very Burgundy-esque and needs a bit of time to open up, but once it does, you’ll find darker fruits like plum and blackberry along with typical Pinot Noir notes of orange peel and ripe cherry. The acid throughout ties the wine together with a nice bow. A very solid offering—well done, Jules.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Taylor's 2019 OTQ Single Vineyard Pinot Noir boasts sedate, composed aromas of ripe black cherries, dried spices and dark loam. From the Wrekin Vineyard in the Brancott Valley, it's a medium-bodied, silky-textured effort accented by hints of smoked meat on the lingering finish. With its overall sense of balance and poise, it should easily age up to a decade, but there's no real reason to defer your pleasure.
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.”
An icon and leading region of New Zealand's distinctive style of Sauvignon blanc, Marlborough has a unique terroir, making it ideal for high quality grape production (of many varieties). Despite some common generalizations, which could be fairly justified given that Marlborough is responsible for 90% of New Zealand's Sauvignon blanc production, the wines from this region are actually anything but homogenous. At the northern tip of New Zealand’s South Island, the vineyards of Marlborough benefit from well-draining, stony soils, a dry, sunny climate and wide temperature fluctuations between day and night, a phenomenon that supports a perfect balance between berry ripeness and acidity.
The region’s king variety, Sauvignon blanc, is beloved for its pungent, aromatic character with notes of exotic tropical fruit, freshly cut grass and green bell pepper along with a refreshing streak of stony minerality. These wines are made in a wide range of styles, and winemakers take advantage of various clones, vineyard sites, fermentation styles, lees-stirring and aging regimens to differentiate their bottlings, one from one another.
Also produced successfully here are fruit-forward Pinot noirs (especially where soils are clay-rich), elegant Riesling, Pinot gris and Gewürztraminer.