97 points - A fantastic pinot with dried strawberries, orange peel, terra-cotta, and dried leaves. It’s full and very layered with creamy and fine tannins that go on for minutes. Plenty of depth and very long with tension and a beautifully creamy, velvety finish” - James Suckling (JamesSuckling.com)

About This Wine

Since the first release in 2005, this wine has been sourced exclusively from our small Home Vineyard site up in the hills of Bendigo sub-region, Central Otago.

The vineyard sits on a high elevation (320 – 390m), steep glacial terrace high above the valley floor. The site features some of the oldest vineyard soils in the valley with the formation of the terrace occurring approximately 650K years ago. The soil age and dry Central Otago climate have combined to create the unusual clay and pedogenic lime soil structure. Beneath layers of clay at a depth of 50-80cm sits a thick layer of chalk. The 7.5ha site was prepared and planted between 1999-2001 and features 7 clones of Pinot Noir and 0.5ha of Pinot Gris. Full organic certification (Biogro) was completed prior to the 2018 vintage.

A strong focus on viticulture is the foundation of the winemaking approach. Yields are consistently managed to 30-35hl/ha or approximately 4ton/ha.

The handpicked fruit is destemmed and fermented using only indigenous ‘wild’ yeast. A key feature of our vinification is extremely low extraction, all our small open top tanks are only hand-plunged once during fermentation. The wine then spends 17 months in barrel (35% new) and undergoes indigenous malolactic fermentation. The wine is bottled unfiltered under Diam cork.

Winemaker’s Notes
2022 vintage notes

We had a cool start to spring with a fairly bleak September, meaning budburst was only fully underway in early October. October was mild and warmed up in the last week with temperatures over 20DegC as vine growth started to accelerate. November, as has often been the case, was a transition month. There were cool temperatures and rain mid-month but by the end of the month we’d had our first day hit 30C.

Our first month of ‘summer’ wasn’t especially hot, December did not have a single day that reached 30C, it was stable but mild with 53mm of rain spread throughout the month. Good growing conditions for the vines with very even shoot growth through this period and a good flowering.

January was when summer arrived, the month was dry and very warm, classic Central Otago golden weather. The warm weather continued through February with some welcome rainfall early in the month.

We started picking in mid-March with Chardonnay and conditions were perfect for harvest, mild temperatures in the mod-20’s and no rainfall after a small shower on the 8th of March. April continued the golden weather, after the first week the temperatures hovered in a range of 15-22 degrees. We were all done on the 12th of April, finishing with the Vin de Paille harvest.

As far as vintages go, everything was rather straightforward, no weather events to disrupt plans, amazing fruit and flavours and easy ferments. Right from the start the wines showed a lovely depth of flavour and concentration, bright aromatics, and good structure in the Pinot Noir.

48 barrels were made.

17 months in French oak barrels

Bottled on 6th of October 2023.

13.5% alc.