Marlborough Pinot Noir 2020

A full and rich bouquet, this wine is mouth filling, ripe and supple with good complexity. Dark cherries and plums combine with soft tannins to give a well-rounded finish.

This wine comes from four vineyards throughout Marlborough, all lending different characters to the wine. The Twin Valleys portion from the cooler Fareham Road area gives us the palate structure that we require, offering finesse to the back-palate. Fruit from the southern valleys gave mid-palate texture and the portion from Ward, approximately 45 kilometres south of Blenheim, providing great depth to the palate, with rich black fruit characters.

In the winery the grapes were predominantly destemmed before going to small vats for cold soaking prior to fermentation, allowing the extraction of soft tannins and colour at the juice stage rather than in the harsher alcoholic stage during and after fermentation. About 20% were fermented with stems or whole-bunch solely with indigenous yeasts offering a wide variety of flavours and helping us to attain better texture.

During fermentation the skins and juice were hand-plunged on average two times per day. When finished the wine was taken straight to French barriques where it sat for 15 months. The wine was then gently racked, blended, and bottled unfiltered and unfined.