Winemaker Notes
Hanspeter’s Estate Pinot Noir is an entry-level wine with pedigree. Macerated for 6-8 weeks before being pressed and then fermented in stainless steel tanks. The wine is aged in large, old wood barrels.
Professional Ratings
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Macerated for four weeks and aged in large oak casks for 24 months, the 2015 Blauer Spätburgunder is Ziereisen's entry-level Pinot Noir. The cherry colored wine offers a beautifully pure, fresh and delicate bouquet of red berries, cherries, crushed stones and dried flowers. Nicely reductive. Light to medium-bodied, this silky-textured and transparent Pinot has a stimulating freshness and remarkable finesse. The tannins are wonderfully crunchy and perfectly interwoven with the mineral structure of this best buy. The finish is terribly fresh and piquant in its beautiful raciness. It's impossible to stop drinking this. The wine was bottled without fining and filtration.
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.”
