Prophet's Rock Sophora Pinot Noir with a glass of red wine and a schist rock

Sophora Pinot Noir 2024

Bottle of Prophet's Rock Sophora Pinot Noir

Sparkling bright ruby in colour. This open and perfumed nose comes through with red fruits, especially raspberry and red cherry, with rose florals unpinned by tea and dusty spices.

The red fruits flow through to the palate joined by blood orange, delicate spices, and dried herb notes. The fine-grained tannin melds seamlessly with the fruit flavours leading to an elegant and very long finish, the florals and raspberry have an especially lingering presence.

The vibrancy and elegance of this wine pairs especially well with salmon and game birds.

Prophet's Rock Sophora Pinot Noir beside a glass of red wine

2023 Jamie Goode, Wine Anorak
This is from the valley floor on fine schist gravels. Juicy, stony and mineral with bright fruit and nice acidity. A multidimensional wine that’s stony and mineral and shows traces of iodine and blood savouriness.

This wine showcases our Kopuwai Delta Vineyard in the Pisa sub-region, Central Otago. This beautiful vineyard sits on a high terrace directly overlooking the Clutha River, at the delta where it runs into Lake Dunstan. Protected by towering mountains on both sides of the valley, this warm site has been shaped by the passage of multiple glaciers. Kopuwai Delta is situated at a narrow point in the valley between the Pisa and Bendigo ranges and lies at 225m elevation. The low vigour, free-draining, very fine schist-based soils feature loess, alluvium, quartz and rounded river stones.

A strong focus on viticulture is the foundation of the winemaking approach. Yields are consistently managed to 30-35hl/ha or approximately 4ton/ha.

The handpicked fruit is destemmed and fermented using only indigenous ‘wild’ yeast. A key feature of our vinification is extremely low extraction, all our small open top tanks are only hand-plunged once during fermentation. The wine then spends 11 months in barrel (20% new) and undergoes indigenous malolactic fermentation.

Mild finish to winter, stable spring with no frost. Regular rainfall through November, fruit set in December when the weather was warm and dry. January and February were warm and very dry until late February when the weather cooled. March was mild but not hot, with only five days reaching 25°C early in the month. From the middle of March until the end of harvest in April, the weather remained stable allowing us the flexibility to pick on flavour and ripeness. The grapes held good acidity, and the resulting wines have a great balance of freshness along with ripe flavours and good structure.

  • Alcohol 13.5%
  • Only 24 barrels were made.
  • Harvest dates: First week of April 2024
  • Bottling date: 13 March 2025
  • The wine is bottled under Diam cork.
  • Bottle weight 565 g (unfilled).