Our Wines

Deep purple red with garnet tones this wine shows blackberries, plums, cherries and some spicy oak on the nose. On the palate the wine has considerable body and concentration with a mouth filling rich mid palate typical of Merlot from this area. Toasty, spicy oak plays a supporting part and helps provide focus and tannin to a fruit forward style of easy drinking merlot.

Machine harvested; these grapes were destemmed and crushed in Gisborne before being trucked south overnight to Blenheim. At our winery in Marlborough the grapes underwent a cold soak for a further 3 days before fermentation spontaneously began and a commercial strain of yeast was added. Temperatures are controlled for the early stages of ferment before being allowed to warm and peak around 30°C as the wine goes dry. Racked to stainless steel tanks the wine underwent a malolactic ferment for a month before being settled and put into a mixture of one, two and three year old oak barriques. Racked three times over the next year the resulting wine is assembled in tank, fined and filtered before being bottled in December 2010.

The grapes for this wine are from a single vineyard on Brunton Road in Gisborne’s famed Patutahi area. Grown on a vertical shoot positioned trellis the crop load is moderated with shoot and crop thinning to provide very ripe and concentrated flavours of exceptional cleanness and varietal expression. Harvested by machine in the cool of the morning the grapes were some of the last of the vintage to be harvested in all of Gisborne being on the 17th April and having a brix of 24.6.