Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Pale to medium ruby-purple, the 2013 Blue Rock Pinot Noir gives notes of black cherries, warm cranberries and red currants with suggestions of dusty earth, baking spices and cedar. Medium-bodied with plenty of weight and generosity of flavors in the mouth framed by medium to firm grainy tannins and lively acid, it concludes with persistent earthy notes.
Rating: 92+ -
Wine Enthusiast
This is a medium-bodied Pinot with a lacy, delicate texture, ideal for drinking over the next eight years or so. Briary, herbal notes accent bright cherry flavors that finish long and tangy, framed by supple tannins and a bit of vanilla.
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.