Little Beauty Black Edition Pinot Noir 2015

Small production. Low yield. Hand harvested. Wild yeast. Complex barrel regime. No compromises. "Be the best you can be". The palate is smooth and supple with hints of ripe, red fruits, combined with cinnamon quill and forest undergrowth. Some earthy notes too. It is alluring, elegant, weighty, rich and ideal for Pinot lovers.

Site features: Discrete, characterful. The Pinot Noir is grown on three different blocks. The lower terraces contain stony silt loam soils with fine sandy loam topsoil and gravels over alluvial gravels. Considerable stone is evident in the topsoil profile. Upper terraces contain friable silt loams over blocky silt loams on gravels. Clones: 115, 667, 777 Canopy: North-south facing rows. The trellis system used is Vertical Shoot Positioning (VSP) and Single Guyot. Crops were shoot thinned early in the season, followed by a green thin at veraison. The use of machine and hand plucking gave the fruit good exposure to take advantage of autumn heat and to ripen phenolics.

The fruit was 100% de-stemmed into stainless steel open top fermenters and cold soaked for several days before the ferments started with naturally occurring yeasts. During ferment, each batch was plunged three times daily to gently extract the tannin and colour. Once dry, each batch was held at 20°C for a post ferment maceration of several weeks before being pressed off separately and transferred into old French Oak (225 litre, 18% new oak) barriques for maturation (almost 12-months).