Colour

Medium bright red with a purple tinge

Nose

lifted and clean notes of pomegranate, ripe strawberries and cherries sing away whilst earthier beetroot notes hum away in the background.

Palate

The palate is juicy and fresh with subtle notes of clove and spice. Young and vibrant at the moment but there are fine grained fruit tannins that will see the wine develop and show lovely secondary characters as the wine reaches four of five years old.

The machine harvested fruit was sorted by hand to remove any non grapes and then loaded directly into our fermenters without crushing or de-stemming. This is the first year we have worked in this way. The fruit was harvested very cleanly and I was confident that extraction issues were also unlikely, so it was a risk worth taking. We allowed most fermenters to begin fermenting naturally but the last of the fermenters to be filled were inoculated with a pied cuve we had made from the previous day. Again we deviated from our usual approach and ran some wine off to old barrels to finish ferment. The main reason was to have another component to play with at assemblage, given the relatively rushed harvest and narrower than usual harvest window. Most batches finished ferment in 10 to 14 days and the wine was then pressed off to settling tanks for two to three days for malolactic fermentation to begin. Two tanks were kept on skins for a fortnight after ferment. The wines appeared quite concentrated from early on and most of the winemaking after pressing was aimed at preserving elegance and providing a good structure to support the more concentrated flavours. This is probably our ripest style Pinot Noir since 2008 and the wine has less of the beetroot/rhubarb and earthy notes that we frequently have and more of the berry spectrum which lends a lovely juiciness to the wine