This wine was made for our friends in the gay community in thanks for their support of our wines. It’s fresh, fun and delicious!
Made from Merlot grapes this wine is vibrant pale strawberry and brimming with the inviting aroma of lifted summer fruits. Think strawberries and cream, this Rosé is full of sweet summer berry fruits. This light wine is great for BBQ’s and Salmon or turkey dishes.
WINEMAKING NOTES:
A culmination of two winemaking requirements, 'Pansy!' is a seriously made wine with a fun personality. There was a real desire to make a quality Rosé for summer drinking. With New Zealand's cool climate there is often the need to intensify colour and flavour in our Bordeaux red varieties. To do this ideally, one "bleeds" up to 25% of the juice from the reds before fermentation. This ensures we have a light fruit driven style of Rosé.
The base for our Rose is Merlot, and vintage depending, supported by a very small percentage Cabernet Franc and/or Malbec for beautiful, floral touches on the nose. Stylistically, we are looking for a light ruby red colour. A berry fruit and sherbet nose with ripe fruit flavours, and balance between residual sweetness, acidity and phenolics, with some structure. Almost a light red wine.
Our Dry Riesling has lashings of lime and lemons and hints of honey and zesty spice and a lovely palate richness and length. Tropical fruit flavours also emerge to linger together with the lime on the palates finish. This wine will develop honey and kerosene like characters with age.
Delicate and fragrant, this is a wonderful food wine when eating hot and spicy dishes.
Think rose petals and Turkish Delight, this aromatic Gewürztraminer also has hints of spice.
Fruit sweetness and natural residual sugar give the palate fullness and assist in a full flavour profile. Cellar for two years with confidence.
Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand is widely regarded as setting a global standard for this variety. A combination of dry and moderate climates gives near perfect cool climate growing conditions and assists with the intense varietal characters unique to Marlborough.
Deriving from the French word sauvage ("wild") and blanc (“white”) ours is a crisp and powerful, well balanced wine with intense aromas of gooseberry, passion fruit and citrus flavours. This light to medium bodied aromatic wine is a great match with salads, seafood and vegetarian dishes and perfectly acceptable to be enjoyed on its own!
WINEMAKING NOTES:
Grapes from all over the Marlborough Region are used in this blend where vineyards are selected by flavour profile for desired outcome. We tend towards the more herbaceous end of the flavour profile, ensuring Marlborough's typicity is retained.
Fruit is night harvested, when the temperatures are cool to minmise oxidation, making it easier to manage in the winery. After that, we tinker as little as possible, letting the vine and the flavour speak, gently guiding it through the course of the winemaking process.
Style wise, we are looking for upfront herbaceous aromas, backed by ripe fruit flavours of melon, passionfruit and crisp acidity.
If you like you Chardonnay with true expression of fruit then this is the one to love! This wine does not hide behind any oak. It’s a crisp wine that tastes of the succulence and freshness of the grape.
White peach, grapefruit and melon with a hint of pineapple flavours are supported by a soft and textured mouthfeel (achieved through malolactic fermentation). It may have no oak, but this wine has an abundance of character. Drink it with all seafood, delicate white meats and creamy pasta dishes.
WINEMAKING NOTES:
This is the wine that started the company, before Sauvignon Blanc became famous! Exposure of the bunches to sunlight is imperative to our style, which is ripe and forward. Canopy management reflects the desired flavour profile. Clone selection is important in this style as we seek intense stone fruit and nashi pear flavours, coupled with powerful and strong citrus/pink grapefruit characters. Secondary malolactic fermentation gives nuttiness and generous mouth feel.
We have found that it is essential to use only premium grade fruit for this wine as there is nothing to hide behind (oak), just the delicate flavours of Chardonnay. Stylistically, we are looking for a wine that expresses the natural Chardonnay fruit characters, being stonefruit and pineapple. The wine undergoes full malolactic fermentation to add roundness and fullness to the wine as well as complexing hazelnut aromas and flavour. We aim for a full-bodied Chardonnay without the encumbrance of oak.
The fruit for this wine is sourced from one of our coastal vineyards in Hawke's Bay. Harvested at relatively low maturity purposely to capture the fresh, crisp fruit characters, one could be excused for confusing this stylistically with wines from the top of the South Island.
The fruit was dejuiced in Hawke’s Bay then transported to Blenheim where it underwent fermentation using selected pure yeast stains. Post ferment the wine was blended with a small amount of Marlborough wine then stabilised, filtered and bottled.
After harvesting, the grapes were crushed, destemmed, and direct pressed with no skin contact. Clarified juice was cool fermented with white wine yeasts to optimise the fruit expression and regionality of each parcel.
Such sweet and rich aromas! The palate is concentrated and full with layers of warm plum and berry fruit flavours. New Zealand Merlot expresses smoothness and richness of ripe fruit thanks to the warm Mediterranean climates of Hawkes Bay in the country’s North Island. Our Merlot is made in a soft and approachable style and suits a broad range of food types including leaner meats and savoury dishes, especially casseroles.
New Zealand is now acknowledged as one of the few countries to have successfully come to grips with this fickle, but supremely aristocratic grape variety. A combination of dry and moderate climates gives near perfect cool climate growing conditions and assists with the intense varietal characters in Marlborough grapes.
This wine puts the NOIR into Pinot; a fine combination of dark cherries and red fruit abound. This is a fruit focused and velvety wine with rich flavours and soft tannins. Lean meats such as veal, venison or turkey, are a great match.
WINEMAKING NOTES:
With this variety, a balance between exposure and shading is the key to get a balance between aromatics and weight. Continually assessing and tweaking exposure ratios is ongoing as the vineyards mature to ensure optimal quality.
Harvest is on flavour where we are looking at ripe dark cherry/raspberry flavours. The tanks are hand plunged to break cap up, and to extract colour and flavour out of skins.
A small portion of the wine goes through malolactic fermentation for mouth feel, the balance is matured on oak for five to seven months before blending. In this wine from Marlborough, we look for ripe, bright, juicy black cherry, backed by the slightest touch of smoky flavours.
This varietal is an attractive, delicately perfumed alternative to Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc. Our Pinot Gris is all about texture and flavour.
Light aroma of pear, peach and nectarine; medium in body with an exceptional balance between fruit sweetness and acidity.
This wine will leave a lasting impression. It’s a great mate with many friends and matches particularly well with Asian food.
WINEMAKING NOTES:
Fruit for our Pinot Gris comes from five to seven year old vines grown in silt, river stone soils which are cropped throughout the season to ensure optimal concentration of flavour and acidity profile.
Upon harvest, grapes are destemmed and pumped to press. Juice is drained immediately and left to settle for 36-48 hours. Fermentation then commences using a range of yeasts chosen for their ability to enhance the flavour profile and palate weight. The wine is then stabilized, filtered, blended, and bottled ready for your enjoyment.
The fruit for this wine was sourced from a few vineyards dotted throughout the Marlborough region covering a range of soils, climates and management regimes. Cool conditions during the flowering period resulted in lighter than average yields and this was followed by ideal ripening and flavour development conditions for the remainder of the growing season.
The grapes were all machine harvested in the cool evening and overnight to preserve flavours. Gentle pressing was followed by a period of cold settling prior to racking to tank for fermentation. When the tanks had completed ferment they were proportionately blended, fined, stabilised and bottled.
