Novum Marlborough Rosé 2024

Description

Dry, Grapefruit, Mineral

"100% Pinot Noir. The palest light-pink hues in the glass. This is strawberry guava, alpine strawberries and the purity of running river streams. Chalk soils, Pink Lady apple and rose petals. What more do you want, bone dry? Well yes, it ticks that box, too. There is also the creaminess of peach trifle and a berry pulp finish. Full of finesse and long lines of salivating acidity to keep you coming back for more; my advice is to buy a lot more than you think you need" Shanteh Wale, Halliday Wine Companion, Dec 2025

A soft translucent pink hue. This is a dry style of Rosé. Immediately an appealing bright wild berry and white stone fruit on the nose. On the palate the wine is more complex. Initially fresh, energetic even juicy through the mid palate, then balanced with some textural weight contributing to a long lingering finish. This is a great wine to enjoy with or without food, anytime of the day or night! 

This is a serious Rosé. So often a Rosé is made from excess/or lack lustre fruit that has come from an over cropped vineyard. Novum Rosé is the antithesis of this. Every part of this wine has been carefully considered to make not only the best Rosé but also to illustrate a sense of place.

Quarters Vineyard is an exceptional vineyard that was planted 30 years ago solely with pinot noir. It has all the hallmarks of a great vineyard - close planted, low yielding and when the years allow, dry farmed. Much emphasis has been placed on the vineyard being dry farmed. The sole purpose of this is to encourage the vine roots to grow deeper into the soil, limiting the uptake of nutrients, minerals and water to what is only immediately available. In other words, the fruit after 30 years should taste like Quarters Pinot Noir, not Marlborough Pinot Noir. With this wine we have taken the ‘terroir’ approach that is typically associated with Pinot Noir and extended it to include Rosé. The result: A sophisticated, nuanced, & concentrated Rosé.

This was the year when the LA Nina weather system that had been active in the Southern Pacific ocean for the previous three years changed to El Nino. In El Nino years, Marlborough experiences longer dry, even hot periods, making these ideal years for grape growing. The 2024 growing season really illustrated this. Initially wet in early spring due to the hangover of La Nina, by late December the longer hotter days had arrived and our fruit ripened slowly gaining flavour whilst retaining a crunchy acidity. 

As with all Novum wines, the fruit for this wine was hand harvested in the early morning, then destemmed and crushed into a stainless fermenter. 10% of the volume of juice was saignéed off the pinot noir fermenters, (to saignée - is the process where the fresh running juice is drained from a tank filled with partially crushed berries), and transferred to two separate tanks for fermentation. The juice was fermented at 14 degrees Celsius to protect the bright fresh berry flavours in the juice. Post fermentation the wine was blended and filtered prior to bottling in August 2024.