Seifried Nelson Pinot Noir 2020

The 2020 Seifried Pinot Noir has aromatic pomegranate, tamarillo and fresh cherry notes on the nose. The palate has savoury notes of mocha, together with nutmeg and plummy fruit. Fine oak tannins complement the fruit weight leaving a generous warm finish on the wine.

Our 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. Our Brightwater Vineyard is situated 15km from the coast and is sheltered from the south by the Richmond ranges. The ‘soil’ is a combination of rocks and boulders which is very hard on the farm equipment but vital for holding the warmth of Nelson’s sun and for ripening the Pinot Noir grapes.

Our Rabbit Island vineyard is situated on a wide river flat. The soil is gravelly loam which is very sandy and free draining. These vineyards are about 1.5 kilometres from the sea which helps moderate temperatures.

The fruit in our 2020 Seifried Nelson Pinot Noir comes from both our Brightwater and Rabbit Island vineyards where our Pinot Noir vines are over thirty years in age and are showing great maturity and depth of flavour. Summer 18-19 was baking hot and dry throughout January and February, leading to beautiful ripe and healthy fruit.

Parcels of fruit were picked incrementally in March 2020 at the peak of flavour and phenolic ripeness. The de-stemmed fruit had a brief cold maceration period before individual parcels were inoculated for fermentation. Throughout fermentation plunging occurred twice daily and was tapered off to once daily as the fermentation finished. 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 during 2021.