Winemaker Notes
This wine is true to the Tolpuddle Vineyard Pinot Noir style: intensely aromatic, balanced with savoury spice notes from whole bunch fermentation, along with purity of varietal expression, fresh acidity, and firm tannins. The 2016 vintage is very perfumed, medium bodied and approachable.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2016 Pinot Noir is lovely. Tasmania is capable of a glossy kind of abundance when it comes to Pinot Noir fruit—it's never overt, but it has a plentitude about it. This is the perfect example of that ample, enveloping potential. The good and tempering aspect here is the cage of tannins created by the whole bunch that holds the fruit in place and discourages it from straying off the path. A super wine. So lovely. Best After 2022
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Vinous
Brilliant red. A highly expressive bouquet evokes fresh raspberry, cherry, candied rose and exotic spices, and a minerally nuance gains power as the wine stretches out. Silky and precise on the palate, offering bitter cherry and red berry flavors that show very good depth as well as energy. In a distinctly suave, graceful style, with excellent finishing clarity, even tannins and persistent, sharply delineated red fruit and floral notes.
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Wine Spectator
Distinctive and expressive, with a thread of fresh tomato leaf, sage and thyme amid the crisp strawberry and cranberry core, the tannins gaining traction on the finish, where a fresh earth note mingles. Drink now through 2023.
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James Suckling
A juicy pinot with lots of dried strawberry and lemon zest character. Medium to full body. Tangy. Easy now but better in 2017. Screw cap.
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.”
Directly south of the city of Melbourne and the Mornington Peninsula wine region, the cool-climate island of Tasmania has earned an honorable reputation as the country’s finest producer of Sparkling Wine. Naturally the region also excels in top quality still wines from Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Riesling, all distinguished because of a high natural acidity. Most of the Tasmania vineyards cluster around the eastern side of the island from north to south.