"A lovely single vineyard offering from the Awatere Valley, the lifted bouquet shows mandarin, pear, lemon peel and spice aromas, followed by a ripe and rounded palate that offers excellent purity and poise. The wine is elegant and vibrant, and displays plenty of delectable flavours. At its best: now to 2019" Sam Kim Wine Orbit

Colour is pale straw. The aroma shows complex pear and tropical fruit aromas. The palate is full showing intense fruit, a fine structure with good minerality and a long clean dry finish. The wine’s texture is charactarised by the very clean mouthfeel and lingering flavours.

Mission’s Blind River vineyard possesses a special aspect with gentle slopes and soils comprising sandy loams, with a proportion of clay particles that overlay a gravel subsoil. They are soils that are naturally free draining and give good vine health but restricted vigour due to these stony sub soils. The blocks are planted over a series of elevations. The lower blocks are on flat land and the soils heavier and crop loads higher. As the elevation gets higher there is more slope and the soils poorer, the vines less vigorous producing lighter crops that produce wine with fantastic minerality. This wine produced off a middle block, had low crop load of 10 tonnes per hectare. The fruit had developed intense flavours at harvest, on the 10th of April at 20 Brix.

The fruit was lightly pressed with minimal skin contact. This wine was made from purely free run juice. It was fermented in stainless steel tanks at low temperature to retain the full varietal flavour in the fruit. The wine was aged on yeast lees for a short time, giving optimum balance and full mouth feel. Because of the good palate weight it has been bottled with only a small amount of residual sugar.