Estate Pinot Gris 2023
Winemaker Note
“Clear, bright appearance. Pale gold colour. Very aromatic! Nice, riper spectrum Pinot Gris character; baked pear, tropical fruits and vanillapod, also subtle ginger spice and white floral notes. Dry concentrated and intense to taste, lovely texture, quite a full-bodied expression of Pinot, featuring nice ripe flavours and fine balanced acidity. We have been developing our Pinot Gris style towards a dryer, more grown-up style for a few years now. I am very happy with this release, it shows we are heading in the right direction.”
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There is a saying in the wine industry – “There are no bad vintages, just the odd challenging one”. Vintage 2023 here in Martinborough would certainly fit into the challenging category. The now infamous triple dip La Nina certainly lived up to the hype. Persistent rainfall and high temperatures are not conditions that favour grape farmers. It took all of our collective skill and hard work to pull the crop through. Winemaking can be a tough trade and unlike beer or gin makers we only get one shot eachyear to create our product, and it’s all about the quality of the fruit!
If mother nature does notabide then tough luck, you gotta work with what you get.
Upon reflection, Vintage 2023, whilst very challenging and far from “classic”, was actually very successful, for us at least. Certainly a tale of two vineyards; our Blue Rock Vineyard performed extremely well and quality was outstanding. Less so our Eclipse vineyard, although there were some excellent pockets, particularly Chardonnay. The biggest take home for me personally was the excellent, never say die attitude of our team. We rallied hard, we doubled down and we never gave up! It is true that adversity builds strength and resilience.
Making awesome wine from the tougher seasons is what this job is all about! Bring on the next vintage.
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Grown over three different blocks at our Blue Rock Vineyard.
This season all blocks were harvested together. All bunches were de-stemmed and fruit wascrushed and transferred to the press for a nice long maceration on skins in order to extractplenty of the nice ripe phenolics and tannins naturally present in the skins. Following thepressing around 40% of the juice was sent to seasoned French oak barrels for fermentation,with the balance fermented long and cool in a temperature controlled stainless steel tank.
Following 6 months on lees both portions were blended before gentle filtration prior to bottling in the Spring.
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Spicy chicken satay and roti bread
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pH 3.35
TA 5.5 g/L
RS 14 g/L
Alc 13 %
Bottled Oct 23
