Villa Maria Cellar Selection Marlborough Pinot Noir 2018

Description

• Red cherries
• Blackcurrant
• Dried herbs
• Toasty oak

The 2018 Cellar Selection Marlborough Pinot Noir has subtle aromatics of dried herbs such as thyme and rosemary intermingled with red cherries and blackcurrants. On the palate, subtle toasty hinty of oak nicely frames the juicy fruit, earthy textures and velvety tannins.

The Pinot Noir fruit for this wine orginates from a diverse range of vineyard sites in both the Awatere and Wairau Valleys in Marlborough with soil types ranging from wind-blown silts to deeper clays.

The 2018 growing season started with excellent Spring and a strong flowering period which was followed by a long spell of hot weather with regular rainfall events through the Summer months. With ample soil moisture, the harvest started earlier than the previous two vintages, luckily the cooler Autumn weather helped retain natural acidities as the season progressed.

Fruit is harvested at night in cooler temperatures and then destemmed and transferred to open-top stainless steel tanks for 3-4 days of cold soaking to extract aromatics. A mixture of indegenous and cultured yeasts are used with ferments, peaking at 32-34ºc to extract the desired colour and tannins. After fermentation, the wine spent 10 months in a mixture of new and seasoned French oak barriques on full lees to add palate weight and texture.