pinot noir 2007

A very low yielding year has produced a rich, concentrated and elegant Pinot Noir with supple savoury tannins. In its youth the nose shows black cherry, dark chocolate and Asian spice notes that will typically change to savoury, earthy characters as the wine ages. On the palate the layers of dark fruits are beautifully entwined with soft, velvet tannins and a seamless texture.  This wine exhibits power and poise and will age gracefully for 10+ years.

VINEYARD

Our Pinot Noir blocks are harvested by hand from vines ageing up to 28 years old, some of New Zealand’s oldest Pinot Noir vines. A range of ten clones including Abel, 10/5 and a variety of the new Dijon clones are planted giving us complexity and a range of blending options.

All the vineyards are situated on the Martinborough Terrace which is famed for its deep, free-draining, alluvial soils which are ideal for making ultra premium Pinot Noir.

The region has a cool, maritime climate along with other beneficial climatic drivers including a rain shadow, one of the country’s largest diurnal temperature differentials, windy springs and a long warm ripening period through autumn. All this results in a natural low-vigour site regulating crops and enabling high quality, consistent, ripe fruit.

VINIFICATION

The fruit is carefully sorted in the vineyard at harvest and again in the winery before being transferred to small open top fermenting vats. The wine undergoes a cool pre-ferment maceration for 4- 7 days at 15°C before fermentation using indigenous yeasts begins. The wine is carefully hand plunged up to three times a day and spends an average of 20 days on skins before being pressed. The wine is then aged for 12 months in French oak barriques before bottling. We use traditional techniques to gently bring out the maximum potential of the grapes and impart complexity and finesse on the finished wine. Martinborough Vineyard Pinot Noir is neither fined nor filtered and is aged in bottle for a further twelve months to aid integration and complexity.

A cold frost swept across Martinborough on the morning of the 9th of November hitting most vineyards in the area. Following this was the coldest December in 60 years which affected the vines flowering and resulted in some extremely small crop levels (less than 1t/Ha. We entered the New Year to better weather, with warm, settled, near perfect conditions lasting right up to the end of May. This enabled us to leave our Pinot Noir grapes until the desired ripeness level and combined with the small nature of the vintage, we harvested grapes with excellent concentration, balance and intensity.