Roaring Meg
Pinot Noir 2010

This wine exhibits a lovely mix of dark red cherry and black berry fruits along with a hint of licorice. Further complexity is gained from oak spice. The wine has a sweet berry entry which displays these same characters in abundance. Lovely ripe textural tannins rise gracefully out of the mid-palate to finish the wine. These are balanced by the wine’s acidity and fruit, to produce a long fruit-driven finish.

Cellaring Potential

Roaring Meg Pinot Noir will improve for 3-5 years given optimal vintage and cellaring conditions.

Vintage 2010

2010 was a vintage of powerful concentration, with the hallmarks of both a warm and a cool season – ripe dark fruit co-mingled with red fruit and a splash of dried herbs!

It was an odd-ball vintage with warm conditions being over-ruled by ongoing winds and rapidly changing weather systems. Low initial bunch numbers coupled with the climatic variability led to yields being down by about 12% on average. A fantastic autumn helped bring the grapes through their last phase of ripening beautifully. Harvest was the latest we have ever experienced with first fruit not being picked till the 8th April. The blocks which are typically early were late, whilst our later blocks were harvested about their normal timeframe; this led to a very condensed, compacted, busy vintage.

Winemaking Considerations

The grapes for this wine come from Cromwell basin vineyards managed by our viticultural team. The odd-ball summer meant we started harvesting on the 14th April and went through to the 6th May. The fruit was all de-stemmed to enhance the natural fruit characters of Central Otago. The grapes stayed in the fermentor on average for a total of 22 days with temperatures peaking at 30-32⁰C. The wine was plunged once daily during pre-fermentation and three times daily during fermentation. When the wine tasted in harmony it was pressed off to French oak barrels where it resided on lees for 10 months. It underwent malolactic fermentation during early spring, was racked out of barrel in early summer and lightly fined with egg white prior to filtration and bottling.