Mt Beautiful North Canterbury Pinot Gris 2020

Description

• Dry style
• Citrus & pear
• Purple sage
• Light & crisp

Their Pinot Gris is an invitation to experience the expected. Aromatically the wine is floral with an undertone featuring scent of purple sage and Pear William. On the palate, it’s dry and fragrant light and crisp with pear and citrus like fruit.

The Pinot Gris is planted on the warm slopes of a north facing hill block of natural uncontoured land, sloping from 55m to 32m above sea level. This site is well suited for Pinot Gris as it is out of the cooler and lower surrounding areas and the soil mix of silt loam and clay provide excellent water holding properties. It is all hand tended throughout the season and at harvest. A variety of Pinot Gris clones have been planted including, German Geisenheim clone 2/21, new clonal reselections from South Africa, e.g. clones 7a, 14a and 52b and the Berrysmith clone, which provides a full bodied, textural wine with a richness in the mid palate.

A complete contrast to the previous few vintages, 2020 is a change in style to lighter more aromatic wine. 2020 was an excellent season. So much so that they had an embarrassment of Pinot Gris. The season was both warm and sunny but also had plenty of soil moisture. This just increased the bunch weights as the Pinot Gris had an excellent flowering. Yields were left to run rampant and the best portion of Pinot Gris from O block they picked for ourselves.

The grapes were, for the first time machine harvested, and were picked early 3rd April as the vineyard crew wanted to go on holiday! This helped retain freshness and reduce alcohol, though the wine had to be chaptalised. The wine was cool fermented and racked and stabilised without fuss. It was bottled on 15.12.20

Food Pairing: Pair our Mt. Beautiful Pinot Gris with spam, chicken, salmon, pork and especially rowdy dinner guests.