Seifried Nelson Pinot Noir 2013 - Cellar Release

Silver - San Francisco International Wine Competition, 2014, USA

Vineyard: Seifried Rabbit Island and Brightwater vineyards
Sugar at Harvest: 24.2°Brix average
Date of Harvest: April 2013
pH of Wine: 3.54
T.A of Wine: 5.2g/L
Vegetarian Friendly: Yes

Our Rabbit Island vineyards is situated on a wide river flat. The soils are made up of gravelly sandy loam, which marks the sites of Māori kūmara (sweet potato) beds prior to European settlement in the early 1800s. The Māori transferred and spread fine gravel and sand over the land to provide suitable soils for their kūmara 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.

This vineyard is about 1.5 km 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 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.

The majority of the fruit in our 2013 Seifried Pinot Noir comes from our Rabbit Island vineyard 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 January 2014.