Winemaker Notes
This wine shows a lively damson plum and red cherry color with aromas of vibrant cherries, spice, and brambly notes, while the palate is supple, juicy, and focused with great energy, offering perfume, tension, sinew, and length, and it pairs beautifully with smoked eel in beurre blanc and new potatoes.
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
Pretty nose with lots of florals layered with strawberry, black cherry and sweet aniseed. Very smooth and silky fruited with a rounded flow across the palate; bright acidity and soft, dry tannins contribute line and length. Plenty of red-fruited charm here – this is very approachable now but has enough punchy fruit to develop well over the medium-term. Handpicked from the organically farmed hillside Settlement Vineyard in the Southern Valleys. Zephyr is the label of veteran Marlborough winemaker Ben Glover, whose family planted their first vineyard in 1985. Vegan.
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James Suckling
Vibrant aromas of cranberries, raspberries, wild strawberries and cinnamon bark. The palate is light-bodied with crunchy tannins and bright acidity. Well-balanced with a crisp, clean finish.
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Vinous
The 2023 Pinot Noir is a tank sample with some guts. Florals, petals, violet, red cherry and integrated oak use appear on the nose. In 2023, there's a new vineyard in the blend - Yarrum - which has given some more guts and assertion. It remains relatively light on its feet, but its core is imbued with punch.
Barrel Sample: 90-91 -
Wine Enthusiast
Strawberry- and raspberry-compote aromas mingle with softer spice-and-vanilla nuances. There’s a lovely grip of chalky, ripe tannins and freshness that counters the supple berry-fruit flavors. Food friendly but oh-so-easy solo, this is a crowd-pleasing bottling.
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.”
An icon and leading region of New Zealand's distinctive style of Sauvignon blanc, Marlborough has a unique terroir, making it ideal for high quality grape production (of many varieties). Despite some common generalizations, which could be fairly justified given that Marlborough is responsible for 90% of New Zealand's Sauvignon blanc production, the wines from this region are actually anything but homogenous. At the northern tip of New Zealand’s South Island, the vineyards of Marlborough benefit from well-draining, stony soils, a dry, sunny climate and wide temperature fluctuations between day and night, a phenomenon that supports a perfect balance between berry ripeness and acidity.
The region’s king variety, Sauvignon blanc, is beloved for its pungent, aromatic character with notes of exotic tropical fruit, freshly cut grass and green bell pepper along with a refreshing streak of stony minerality. These wines are made in a wide range of styles, and winemakers take advantage of various clones, vineyard sites, fermentation styles, lees-stirring and aging regimens to differentiate their bottlings, one from one another.
Also produced successfully here are fruit-forward Pinot noirs (especially where soils are clay-rich), elegant Riesling, Pinot gris and Gewürztraminer.