Mahi Marlborough Pinot Noir 2016

Mahi Marlborough Pinot Noir 2016A full and rich bouquet, this wine is mouthfilling, ripe and supple with good complexity. Dark cherries and plums combine with soft tannins to give a well rounded finish. Mahi, means our work, our craft, whilst the symbol represents the strength, life & growth of the native fern, with the understanding that wine should never be rushed, respecting its ability to evolve naturally over time. This wine comes from three vineyards throughout Marlborough,

A full and rich bouquet, this wine is mouthfilling, ripe and supple with good complexity. Dark cherries and plums combine with soft tannins to give a well-rounded finish.

Mahi, means ‘our work, our craft’, whilst the symbol represents the strength, life & growth of the native fern, with the understanding that wine should never be rushed, respecting its ability to evolve naturally over time.

This wine comes from three vineyards throughout Marlborough, all lending different characters to the wine. The Twin Valleys portion from the cooler Fareham Road area gives us the palate structure that we require; offering finesse to the back-palate. Fruit from the Byrne vineyard this year gave some lovely delicacy, though bigger blacker fruit notes than we have seen before. The final portion came from Ward, approximately 45 kilometres south of Blenheim, providing great depth to the palate, with rich black fruit characters.

In the winery the grapes were predominantly destemmed before going to small vats for cold soaking prior to fermentation, allowing the extraction of soft tannins and colour at the juice stage rather than in the harsher alcoholic stage during and after fermentation. The grapes were then fermented solely with indigenous yeasts offering a wide variety of flavours and helping us to attain better texture.
During fermentation the skins and juice were hand-plunged on average three times per day, with the temperatures peaking at about 34 degrees. When finished the wine was taken straight to French barriques where it sat for 18 months. The wine was then gently racked, blended, and lightly fined with organic egg whites before bottling.

After a cool start to the growing season in September we had a warm spell late November and early December which really suited flowering. Christmas was slightly cooler then midway through January it started to heat up and the ripening season has been one of our warmer ones of late. In general the acids in the juice are slightly lower than some years, and there have been some blocks we picked a bit earlier to retain that acidity, leaving the balance out to develop the texture on the palate.

After about 18 months of drought like conditions we had two rains just as we were easing into picking. A few of us were nervous when the second rain came through, but as so often happens the beautiful mountains to the north-west of us protected us. Giving us clear fine weather and allowing us the leisure of picking as our parcels ripened.