Retrospect Pinot Noir 2019

Retrospect is our rarest cuvée at only six barrels. Coming from a small corner of the Home Vineyard, this wine is carefully cellared and only released a minimum of five years after vintage.

97 Points.
Gorgeous aromas of dried strawberry and cedar with some dried flowers follow through to a full body with fine and polished tannins that give the wine tension and focus. Velvety tannins with a creamy finish. Spicy, chocolatey and nutty in the finish. Sexy and seductive. Single parcel. Clone 115. Drink or hold.

James Suckling
writing of the 2018 vintage

An historically warm vintage has resulted in slightly lighter on its feet Retrospect. Classic structure, length and depth from the chalk heavy clay soils combines with florals of rose petal, red, blue and black fruits, and a hint of Middle Eastern spice. Silky tannins and a line of citrus like acidity lead to an energetic and long finish.

Cellaring: Drinking well with decanting on release and will continue to reward collectors for 10+ years from from vintage.

Since the first release in 2010, this Pinot Noir has been sourced exclusively from the same parcel on our small Home Vineyard site up in the hills of Bendigo sub-region, Central Otago.

The vineyard sits on a high elevation (320 – 390m), steep glacial terrace high above the valley floor. The site features some of the oldest vineyard soils in the valley with the formation of the terrace occurring approximately 650K years ago. The soil age and dry Central Otago climate have combined to create the unusual clay and pedogenic lime soil structure. Beneath layers of clay at a depth of 50cm in this parcel sits a thick layer of chalk. The 7.5ha site was prepared and planted between 1999-2001 and the parcel of Pinot Noir for this wine is a single clone at the eastern end of the steep front face. Full organic certification (Biogro) was completed prior to the 2018 vintage.

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 17 months in barrel (35% new) and undergoes indigenous malolactic fermentation. This wine is carefully cellared after bottling and only released a minimum of 5 years after vintage.

An early and warm spring with all penological stages of development being advanced through the warm start and summer. Budburst, flowering, veraison, were all early. By end of second week of January, we’d had more GGDs than all of 2017. Snow on 1st February led to a very cool February, the lead into the early harvest was cool and led to good acidities even though it was the earliest harvest for us on record.

  • Alcohol 14.0%
  • Only 1,668 bottles were made
  • Harvest dates: 15 March 2018
  • Bottling date: 12 November 2019
  • The wine is bottled under Diam cork.
  • Bottle weight 565 g (unfilled).
  • All bottles are hand-numbered and wax dipped.