Mt Beautiful North Canterbury Pinot Noir 2019

Description

• French oak
• Red berry fruit
• Florals & spice
• Subtle tannins

As a personal favorite of Mt. Beautiful owner David Teece, it’s incredibly important for this Pinot Noir to showcase the best aspects of the varietal. Subtlety is the secret inside this wine. It begins with sophisticated floral fragrances of sweet spice and ripe soft red berry fruits, while showcasing an elegant medium-weight palate that features fragrant strawberry and bramble fruit, earthiness and subtle tannins.

The Pinot Noir is planted on the Southern section of the vineyard, which has the highest elevation, providing extra warmth and less exposure to frost. In addition, the vines are closely planted to reduce vigour, resulting in lower crop levels and allowing us to ripen these grapes to achieve a true expression of this variety. We hand tend all our Pinot Noir throughout the season and at harvest. This mix of Pinot Noir clones were specifically chosen for their flavor profile with 50% of the vineyard planted in Burgundy clones. Clone 667 fills out the middle palate, while 777 provides a long finish. The rest of the vines are a mixture of eleven other clones, including UCD 5, UCD 6, 114, 115, Mariafeld, AM10, 4, 5, 943 and Abel. The aim of these selections is to build sound palate structure in the wine, providing a vibrant ruby colored wine with ripe fruit, subtle tannins, great length and persistence of flavour.

2019 was a good growing season that was considerably warmer than normal. Pinot Noir though was quite diffcult as it had poor flowering and consequently very low yields. In addition, flowering was extended over several weeks resulting in some variability of fruit maturity and consequently handling of tannin extraction in the winery had to be done very carefully. Harvest started on 28th March and Pinot noir was finished on 5th April. Fruit was ripening, had good sugar levels, and acidity was higher than normal. There was some variability in tannin ripeness. Consequently the harvest was 100% destemmed to open fermenters. After a cold soak of 5 -10 days a fast fermentation ensued. All the time being treated very gently with careful plunging twice daily. The wines were then left on skins for a further period, some cuvees pressed quickly to retain freshness and fruitiness whilst others that had better tannin structure and were left on skins for an extended period. The wines were all aged in French oak barrels, 20% of which were new, for 11 months where they underwent the malolactic fermentation prior to blending and bottling 12 months following harvest.

Food Pairing: Pair our Mt. Beautiful Pinot Noir with Miles Davis, rare roast beef and horseradish sauce, hard salty cheeses like Pecorino Romano or moussaka on a rainy night.