Winemaker Notes
With maturing vines and a truly favourable year for Gewurz, this wine speaks with real accuracy and pride of its place. This, along with slow, whole bunch pressings, wild ferments and extended lees contact, has resulted in a wine which is defined by remarkable grace and clarity.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Stunning purity of lychee and rose-water aromas here with fresh bread, wet stones and breathtaking fragrant appeal. The palate has a smooth-honed and layered, textural feel with supple, fleshy lychee and melon, as well as pear and honeysuckle. From bio dynamically grown grapes. Drink or hold.
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Wine Enthusiast
Gewürztraminer can be a tricky variety to get right in the New World, but Rippon nails it. The perfume is heady but not sickly, and there’s a different aroma at each sniff: lemon oil, pineapple rind, pressed yellow wildflowers, fennel fronds, honeysuckle and jasmine. The palate shows similarly evocative flavors and a unique, chalky texture. There’s what feels like very slight residual sugar, but it’s subtle, letting the floral and honey notes and radiant acidity shine. Quite simply, there’s nothing else like it.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Effusive floral, lychee and spice aromas emerge from the 2019 Gewurztraminer. Yet for all the showy scents, the wine isn't that broad, showing admirable balance and focus to its medium-bodied palate. If there's a touch of sugar here, it's barely noticeable, finishing clean and crisp.
Gewürztraminer, an expressive and aromatically distinctive white grape variety, is considered a noble variety in the Alsace region of France, and produces wonderful wines in the mountainous Alto Adige region of NE Italy. Generally this grape grows well in cooler regions and its natural intensity makes it a great ally for flavorful cuisine such as Indian, Middle Eastern or Moroccan. Somm Secret—Because of a charming perfume and tendency towards slight sweetness, Gewürztraminer makes for an excellent gateway wine for those who love sweet wines but want to venture into the realm of drier whites.
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.