Estate Pinot Noir

The Marlborough estate of the Bourgeois family, tenth-generation growers from Sancerre, who ended a twelve-year search for new land by buying 98 hectares in the Wairau Valley in 2000 and naming the property for their father Henri. Damien Yvon is listed by the producer as general manager, winemaker and vineyard manager, with no start date given; trade coverage puts his arrival at the estate in 2006.

The property is split by the Wairau Fault and sits on soils left by the Otiran and Waimaungan glaciations. The producer counts three of them: the Waimaunga windblown clays, Broadbridge and Wither, and a third that the terroir pages call Otira glacial stones and the tech sheets call greywacke. The Estate bottling is described as an assemblage of parcels drawn from all three. Farming is certified organic with BioGro, fully certified from the 2013 harvest, and the bottle carries the EU and French AB organic marks that follow the fruit through Henri Bourgeois as importer of record in France. Clos Henri says it works to biodynamic principles but claims no biodynamic certification.

The producer publishes no 2021 sheet for this wine. Its standing protocol for the Estate Pinot is hand sorting, 10 to 20 percent whole cluster with the rest destemmed, gravity filling of large open-top stainless steel without crushing, a week of cold soak, indigenous yeast, gentle pump-overs rather than plunging, maceration running up to three weeks, then eleven months in 7,500 litre French oak vats rather than smaller barrels. Across the range the house says it uses no isinglass or milk and works at about half the sulphur of conventional Marlborough wines.

2021 gave the estate the smallest crop of Pinot Noir it had ever taken in. Rain over a long, cool flowering at the end of November caused coulure and millerandage, and the producer notes Pinot was hit harder than Sauvignon Blanc. Picking of Pinot began on 12 March and the last fruit came in on 9 April, a fortnight earlier than 2020; to get ripe tannins the estate waited on the larger berries and gave up a good share of the smaller ones. The national harvest came to 370,000 tonnes, down 19 percent on the year before, with New Zealand Winegrowers putting the mid-country regions, Marlborough among them, down more than 20 percent and attributing the smaller crop to a cooler spring and to late frosts in some regions.