Seifried Nelson Pinot Noir 2012 - Cellar Release

Awards

Silver: International Wine & Spirit Competition 2013, UK

Wine Analysis

Vineyard: Seifried Rabbit Island and Brightwater Vineyards
Sugar at Harvest: 24.1°Brix average
Date of Harvest: April 2012
pH of Wine: 3.48
T.A of Wine: 5.6g/L
Suitable for Vegetarians and Vegans: Yes

The Vineyards

Our Rabbit Island Vineyards are situated on a wide river flat. The soils are made up of gravelly sandy loam, which marks the sites of Maori kumara beds (sweet potato) prior to European settlement in the early 1800’s. The Maori transferred and spread fine gravel and sand over the land to provide suitable soils for their kumara plantings. Scrub was burned to give ash and charcoal, which increased soil fertility and gave characteristic topsoil. This fertility is now considerably reduced due to modern farming. The soils are very sandy and free draining, and the water table is relatively high ensuring adequate underground water.

These vineyards are about 1.5 kilometres from the sea, which helps moderate temperatures. Light cropping with the use of both leaf and fruit removal around the fruit zone allowed the sun to fully ripen and produce rich concentrated flavoured fruit. Several newer clones of Pinot Noir have improved the intensity and flavour of this variety produced from our Rabbit Island Vineyard since 1993.

The Brightwater vines are grown in an extremely stony area of the vineyard, where water and nutrient levels are low. This helps us to restrict the plants vigour and to crop at low levels. To further enhance the aromatics we removed leaves to allow light penetration and air movement around the fruiting zone.

Winemakers Note

The majority of the fruit in our 2012 Seifried Pinot Noir comes from our Rabbit Island Vineyards where our Pinot vines are now into their twenty’s, and showing great maturity and depth of flavour in the fruit. The parcels of grapes were picked incrementally at the peak of flavour and phenolic ripeness, which occurred during April. The de-stemmed fruit had a 3 – 5 day cold maceration period before individual parcels were inoculated for fermentation. Throughout fermentation plunging occurred twice daily and was tapered off to once daily during the 5 – 6 day post-fermentation maceration. The young wine was drained to new, one and two year old French barriques for malolactic fermentation and barrel ageing. The wine was stabilised and bottled in June 2013.

Tasting Note

The 2012 Seifried Pinot Noir has juicy raspberry and plum characters together with soft savoury notes. The palate has a full succulent entry and generous fruit flavours wrapped around spicy oak tannins.