Te Whare Ra Single Vineyard Marlborough Pinot Gris 2024

Description

Dry, Oatmeal, Pear

"This wine is elegant and beautifully balanced, showcasing flavours of apricot, Asian pear, Gala apple, and delicate white floral notes, with a hint of almond meal. On the palate, it is succulent and well-defined, offering excellent weight and a fleshy texture, along with a wonderfully long and refined finish. It’s a serious Pinot Gris that is both enticing and immediately appealing. At its best: now to 2034" Sam Kim, Wine Orbit, Apr 2025

"Aromatic and engaging with scents of fresh brown pear and red apple, there’s a fine just ripe quince idea, lots of lees complexities and a fine layer of fruit spice. Delicious on the palate, textured and new, flavours of pomaceous fruits with a touch of citrus. The lees quality from the bouquet follows through onto the palate enhanced by the acid line which is ripe, refreshing and with salivating effect. Youthful and taut still, a lovely example to enjoy from late 2025 through 2030" Cameron Douglas, Master Sommelier

"The 2024 Pinot Gris leads with lemon barley and cut pear, and green apple emerges alongside white flowers and white pepper. The bunches of this clone are smaller, with smaller berries that are exposed early, and the grapes can be picked a little earlier. The dappled exposure to the elevated UV here helps to thicken the skins on the berries. I attribute the texture and focus of this wine largely to the clones in the vineyard; however, there is a barrel-ferment portion that opens up the shape and provides some chew. A lovely wine, it’s quite different from many of the Pinot Gris wines here in Marlborough, which tend toward ample and voluminous" Erin Larkin, The Wine Advocate

This wine is finely structured with great fruit purity & length of flavour and a lovely fleshiness. Lifted aromas of nashi pear, raspberry, red apple and white florals follow on to flavours of the same along with savoury undertones from the oak and time on lees, These flavours are balanced by fine, supple texture and lingering minerality. This release is a dry style which has concentration, balance and great texture with layers of flavour. 

We are passionate about aromatic varieties and particularly those from Alsace so it was only a matter of time until we took on the challenge of Pinot Gris. When we first bought the property here, we replanted a section of the old block with the Berry-Smith clone (also known as Larkham clone) of Pinot Gris. We selected this particular clone especially for its low cropping, small bunches and small berries as we felt it would deliver the best quality fruit. These vines are now 20yrs old and the quality of the fruit just gets better and better each year. Pinot Gris is the “sister” of Pinot Noir and shares many of its familial “issues”. It is quite crop sensitive and we feel that to get the best out of it you really must go the extra mile in the vineyard. So like Pinot Noir it is all shoot-thinned, and bunch-thinned and we often remove the bunch shoulders as well. This means that we can get it into the winery with fruit purity and natural acidity as well as concentration.

This growing season for us this year was very different than that which the overall region experienced so that is important to note here. You will have no doubt seen all the media stories about the yields being significantly down in Marlborough due to frost and flowering impacts – but we had frost protection and due to our canopy management techniques, we did not experience the flowering issues that plagued others, so our yields were right on our LTA. We had very low rainfall over this growing season with the June to January period being the driest in 94 years! But our continued focus on building good organic matter levels (OM) in our soils meant that we were not impacted by the drought and our vines sailed through with balanced set and very healthy canopies. Harvest this year was very compact due to the dry season - with most of our crop off within the first 8 days. Our vintage team worked like a well-oiled machine to get it all in, so we are thrilled with both the quality and quantity this season. The resultant wines are very impressive with great depth of flavour and fleshiness whilst still exhibiting lovely purity of fruit, bright aromatics, and ripe, juicy acidity. This 2024 Pinot Gris is enjoyable to drink now and will also benefit from careful cellaring for 3-7 years.

All fruit for this wine was hand-picked and then hand sorted. The grapes were destemmed, crushed then air bag pressed, some parcels had lengthier skin contact time. Free run and pressings were fermented separately. Fermentation is majority stainless steel, with 17% in old French oak for texture and complexity. The tank portions underwent slow, cool ferments to retain aromatics. Barrel ferment parcels were carried out in large format neutral oak on full lees, lees stirred regularly. All parcels given time on ferment lees to provide texture and complexity. This wine has not been fined and is suitable for vegans and vegetarians and anyone else who loves authentic, hand-made wines.