Te Mata Estate Alma Hawke's Bay Pinot Noir 2024

Description

Oak, Redcurrant, Wood

"This is sweetly fruited and seductively fragrant, revealing ripe cherry, Black Doris plum, smoked game, thyme, olive, and toasted almond characters with an Asian spice undertone. It’s silky-smooth and supple in the mouth, offering a beautifully layered mouthfeel backed by finely infused tannins, making it superbly structured with a sustained, complex finish" Sam Kim, Wine Orbit, 

"Smoky aromas of fresh and dried strawberries with orange peel follow through to a medium to full-bodied palate. Lightly dry tannins frame the wine beautifully. So savoury. Solid and structured yet highly approachable at the end" James Suckling, Oct 2025

"Expressive perfume with black plum, cherries, wild raspberry, violets and plenty of baking spices, a pleasing savoury note threaded beneath. Densely fruited, savoury, elegant and quite tightly wound, with fine but slightly chewy tannins. Oak is nicely interwoven with fruit, acid and tannins. Long. Quite a polished style, with a sense of careful crafting" Emma Jenkins, Master of Wine, Dec 2025

Alma ’24 presents a captivating cherry red hue with a hint of purple. Its aroma is immediately enticing, featuring redcurrants, strawberries, fresh prunes, and ripe raspberries, complemented by delicate notes of violet, thyme, sage and warming chai spices. On the palate, the wine’s weight and volume are further enhanced, creating a velvety texture that balances refreshing fruit with powdery tannins. Dark cherries and ripe plums blend seamlessly with liquorice and mulberry, culminating in a long finish of fruit sweetness and spice. A masterpiece of detail and concentration and irresistibly enjoyable. Alma ’24 is closed with a Diam cork and will evolve in bottle for 10 years from harvest.

First planted in 1999, Alma is the finest expression of Te Mata Estate’s commitment to great New Zealand pinot noir. Alma expresses brooding cherry and delicious ripe, dark plum flavours that unfurl with savoury wildwood scents of truffle and spice.

Alma celebrates Dr James Thomson, a hero of the 1854 Battle of the Alma during the Crimean War and forefather to Te Mata Estate’s Buck family. Knowing the vanquished enemy soldiers had already contracted cholera, Dr Thomson volunteered to tend to their wounds, saving the lives of over four hundred, and sacrificing his own in the process. The medal he was awarded for this selfless act of valour appears on the label of Alma Pinot Noir.

Separate parcels of fully ripened pinot noir grapes were hand harvested from Te Mata Estate’s Woodthorpe vineyard between 7 and 12 March 2024.

The individual lots were each destemmed and given a traditional warm-plunged fermentation. The resulting wines underwent extended maceration on skins before pressing. The separate wines were all run to a mixture of new and seasoned French oak barriques for 10 months’ maturation, with 33% being new oak.v