Mt Beautiful North Canterbury Pinot Noir 2020

Mt Beautiful North Canterbury Pinot Noir 2020As a personal favorite of Mt. Beautifuls owner David Teece, its incredibly important for our Pinot Noir to showcase the best aspects of the varietal. Subtlety is the secret to find inside this wine. It begins with sophisticated floral fragrance followed by sweet spice and ripe black berry and logan berry fruits. It shows as an elegant weighty wine in the palate featuring fragrant bramble fruit, considerable spice and a dark chocolate earthiness

As a personal favorite of Mt. Beautiful’s owner David Teece, it’s incredibly important for our Pinot Noir to showcase the best aspects of the varietal. Subtlety is the secret to find inside this wine. It begins with sophisticated floral fragrance followed by sweet spice and ripe black berry and logan berry fruits. It shows as an elegant weighty wine in the palate featuring fragrant bramble fruit, considerable spice and a dark chocolate earthiness finishing with subtle chalky tannins.

Our Pinot Noir is planted on the Southern section of our vineyard, which has the highest elevation, providing extra warmth and less exposure to frost. In addition, our vines are closely planted to reduce vigour, resulting in lower crop levels and allowing us to ripen these grapes to achieve a true expression of this variety. We hand tend all our Pinot Noir throughout the season and at harvest.

Our mix of Pinot Noir clones were specifically chosen for their flavor profile with 50% of the vineyard planted in Burgundy clones. Clone 667 fills out the middle palate, while 777 provides a long finish. The rest of the vines are a mixture of eleven other clones, including UCD 5, UCD 6, 114, 115, Mariafeld, AM10, 4, 5, 943 and Abel. The aim of these selections is to build sound palate structure in the wine, providing a vibrant ruby colored wine with ripe fruit, subtle tannins, great length and persistence of flavour.

2020 was a superb growing season that was considerably warmer than normal. Pinot Noir had excellent flowering and consequently very good yields. Flowering was short and sweet leading to even bunch formation. The summer progressed well with adequate moisture warm days and relatively cool nights. Veraison was in the middle of February and lead through to an early harvest commencing on 20th March.

Fruit had good sugar levels, and acidity and even tannin ripeness. The majority of cuves were hand harvested, 100% destemmed to open fermenters. One batch making up 14% of the blend was fermented with about 20% whole bunches. After a cold soak of 5 -10 days a fast fermentation ensued. All the time being treated very gently with plunging twice daily. The wines were then left on skins for a further period, some cuvees pressed quickly to retain freshness and fruitiness whilst others that had better tannin structure were left on skins for an extended period. The wines were all aged in French oak barrels, 20% of which were new, for 11 months where they underwent the malolactic fermentation prior to blending and bottling 12 months following harvest.

Food Pairing: Pair our Mt. Beautiful Pinot Noir with Miles Davis, rare roast beef and horseradish sauce, wild pork and pouha or moussaka on a rainy night.