Reserve Marlborough Pinot Noir

This velvet-soft wine is full of delicious red berry, cherry and plum fruit aromas and flavours, with silky tannins.

RESERVE MARLBOROUGH PINOT NOIR

Expertly crafted from our favourite vineyards, our Reserve wines have impressive flavour concentration and palate weight. Adorning every label on every bottle of Rapaura Springs wine is a simple symbol – a circle of rocks that signify the pure spring in our home vineyard in the heart of Marlborough, New Zealand. Our label and our name represent our intimate connection to the pristine waters that collect high in the Southern Alps and are gradually filtered beneath the region’s braided rivers, refreshing the deep underground aquifers that feed our vines, and bubble up in our own Rapaura Springs.

TASTING NOTES

This velvet-soft wine is full of delicious red berry, cherry and plum fruit characters. Spicy oak and silky tannins underpin the fruit flavours, combining for an elegant, lingering finish.

WINEMAKING NOTES

Fruit for our 2020 Reserve Marlborough Pinot Noir is from a selection of premium Pinot Noir vineyard sites throughout Marlborough. Perfect weather over flowering in the spring of 2019 produced unprecedented berry numbers. Fortunately, the driest summer on record then suppressed the berry growth. By harvest time, berry size was small to moderate, which has given the wines substantial structure and concentration. Late summer brought Marlborough’s trademark cooler nights, that are so important to our aromatic qualities and retention of acidity.

The introduction of a nationwide lockdown to slow the spread of COVID-19 coincided with the beginning of our harvest. Our vineyard and winery teams moved incredibly fast to adhere to the very strict distancing and hygiene protocols to allow us to continue to operate. Favourable weather allowed us to pick our Pinot Noir when perfectly ripe. After harvest, the fruit was cold-soaked for five days to extract flavour, tannins and colour. Fermentation followed, in a selection of small open-top tanks, using a selection of yeasts. Each ferment was plunged three times a day. The wine was left to macerate for five days before a gentle pressing off the skins. The wine was aged in French oak barriques for 10 months, including 20% new oak.

2020 Tasting Note 2019 Tasting Note 2018 Tasting Note