Gladstone Vineyard Estate Pinot Noir 2019

Red, purple hue. The nose has fragrant characters of blackberry and dark cherry with floral undertones. Beautifully balanced by savoury oak notes, and sage characters. The palate is refined and tight, with real texture. Fruits form early but the wine is carried by a lovely savoury tone and whole bunch structure and tannins.

The Gladstone district in the Wairarapa, New Zealand is a fast-growing wine area, as winemakers realise the potential of the quality soil and climate conditions that produce low- yielding, rich, concentrated grapes and show off the very best of the terroir. The result, is our style of wine. Aromatic, fresh and true to varietal!

We believe that the most important part of winemaking occurs in the vineyard. Our grapes are managed with great care, ensuring the best possible fruit is brought to the winery at harvest, giving our winemaking team every opportunity to be creative whilst still striving to produce international, award-winning wines.

The Wairarapa wine region, of which Gladstone is part of, is famous for its savoury and well structured Pinot Noirs that develop and age extremely well. Some of the environmental conditions for this would be seen as a problem in other regions but the Wairarapa winegrowers embrace them as they are what makes Wairarapa wines consistently great. The biggest influence from the Wairarapa we have is the wind - the prevailing wind is from the North West and can get close to gale force regularly, especially during spring and early summer. This wind during budburst and flowering naturally keep crop levels low, which maintain an intensity of flavour and texture with minimal fruit thinning required.

Other environmental conditions that make this region great are the warm and dry summers but with a large diurnal temperature variation with hot dry days but cool nights, these natural temperature rhythms stabilise colour and balanced acidity whilst allowing for long ripening of flavours in balance with sugar development in the berry. Also, due to the conditions at flowering, the berry size tends to be on the smaller size, which results in better skin to juice ratio resulting in better more intense and well-structured wines. Where the Wairarapa Pinots get their trademark savoury complexity is down to a mixture of optimal ripening conditions, soil profiles throughout the region and clonal makeup of the Pinot Noir vines throughout the region.

Blairpatrick is on the same river terrace system as Dakins Road albeit on a slightly elevated terrace. This site is super free draining towards the terrace edge and slightly heavier at the edge further away from the terrace. This mixed vigour site is not irrigated, which means the roots have to delve deep into the soils to obtain water, providing the ability to show outstanding minerality and concentrated dark red characters.

The vineyard is planted in:

- Pinot Noir, With a mix of Dijon clones ( 777, 667, 13, 115) delivering an elegant mix of characters of typical Wairarapa Pinots, but inherently displays balance due to its mixed vigour and no irrigation. It's slightly more exposed to the infamous Wairarapa Northwesters, which means it is naturally low cropping with minimal intervention needed to keep the crop levels in balance.

Carters is a non-irrigated block on slightly heavier soils being a mix of alluvial soils but with a clay layer trending towards slightly lighter and elegant wines.

The vineyard is planted in: - Pinot Noir, All clone 5 but shows a restrained elegance and lighter characters than a typical clone 5 planted on free-draining soils.

The fruit was de-stemmed into 2-tonne fermentation tanks with about 70% of the fruit left as whole berries. As far as possible, all clones were vinied separately to allow each clone's unique characteristics to express themselves. We applied a cold soak period of 3–5 days followed by spontaneously started ferments. All batches received a post-soak of between 2–3 weeks with plunging done by hand to ensure a soft extraction of tannins. We then pressed o the batches and matured them in French oak barrels (15% new) for 10 months, each with its own balanced oak regime of barrel age and choice of coopers