Auntsfield Single Vineyard Marlborough Pinot Noir 2023

Description

Chocolate, Floral, Oak

"Offering gorgeous fruit purity with seductive complexity, the bouquet shows dark plum, rich floral, olive, clove, and toasted almond nuances. The palate delivers excellent weight and persistency, splendidly framed by fleshy texture and polished tannins. Wonderfully composed with multi-layered mouthfeel and alluring flavours, finishing impressively long and refined" Sam Kim, Wine Orbit, Jan 2025

Deep ruby. Fragrant black cherry and rich plum fruit is subtly lifted by layers of dark red  florals and complex savoury forest floor, dark chocolate, cigar box. The palate of this wine shows a rich silky texture, which is full and concentrated. Pure flavours of ripe berry fruit and dark plum fill the pallet. This fruit is supported by powerful yet fine polished tannins giving a plush yet silky texture with seamless length.

Auntsfield continues the proud heritage of Marlborough’s first vineyard and winery established in 1892. Our Single Vineyard wines are made from grapes grown at Auntsfield Estate. Each wine shows the distinctive characteristics of ripeness, texture and minerality - qualities unique to the ancient Greywacke rock and Loess clay soils of the vineyard. Pinot Noir holds a special place in our hearts. We grow the grapes and make this wine with particular care and attention. The resulting wines are distinctive for their lifted aromatics, silky mouth feel and the powerful expression of pure fruit, ripe tannin and balanced oak.

The 2023 season was excellent. Regular winter rainfall and a cool spring encouraged canopy growth but kept cropping levels at a balanced level. Summer had regular rainfall but stayed relatively cool resulting in healthy vines with no disease or water stress. There was a slow progression into Autumn with a long drawn-out ripening period where the fruit reached optimum ripeness in perfect harvest conditions.

This wine was made with a minimalist philosophy, designed to reveal the characteristics of the grapes and the vineyard. The fruit was hand-harvested, hand-sorted, gently destemmed and gravity-fed to tank. Fermented with indigenous yeast from Auntsfield vineyard. Careful hand plunging was utilised to gently extract flavours and tannins from the skins. Maturation occurred in French oak barriques for approximately 12 months.