Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
Concentrated, with firm and juicy black cherry and blackberry flavors that are generous and velvety, exhibiting a range of star anise and black tea details. A fresh loamy earth note lingers on the long, powerful finish. Drink now through 2026.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2013 Last Chance Pinot Noir has a medium ruby-purple color and nose of red currants, black cherries and dark chocolate with hints of menthol, dried herbs and violets. Medium-bodied, it fills the mouth with bramble berry flavors and an elegant, tightly knit structure of satiny tannins and great frshness, finishing long with a herbal lift.
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Wine & Spirits
Dean Shaw got his start at Rippon in the 1990s, then worked in Burgundy, Austria and South Africa before returning to Central Otago to join Sam Neill’s project, working with vineyards in Gibbston and Alexandra’s Earnscleugh Valley. Last Chance comes from Alex Paddocks, a seven-acre hillside of schist gravels that Neill’s team planted in 1998, certified organic in 2008. Shaw makes it with whole clusters in the ferment and without added yeast, the stemminess showing up in the tannins, opening them into a powder keg of mineral darkness. Crushed blackberry and blueberry flavors add a hint of sweetness to those tannins, creating a powerful wine with clear potential to develop as it ages.
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.