Marlborough Pinot Noir

Pinot noir is the grape of long arguments, and Marlborough is where one of the longest is quietly being settled. The region built its fortune on sauvignon blanc, but growers planted pinot from the earliest years, first for sparkling wine and then for table wine, and the variety now covers the valley's second largest area of vineyard. The wines have emerged from the shadow of Central Otago and Martinborough with a style of their own, and this page profiles it: the grape, the ground, the regional character and the comparisons.

The grape itself

Pinot noir is old, mutable and thin skinned, which is the whole trouble and the whole point. It mutates readily, so vineyards are a mosaic of clones with names and numbers, each ripening and flavouring slightly differently; it ripens early, so a cool region can carry it; and its thin skins give colour and tannin reluctantly, so the winemaker extracts gently or ends up with pink ink. In the glass the variety's core is red fruit, cherry and raspberry in youth, moving with age towards plum, game and forest floor, carried on acidity that stays bright and tannins that stay fine. It shows where it grew more nakedly than almost any other grape, which is why regions fight over it.

What the valley floor gives it

Marlborough's pinot acreage sits mostly on the deeper, cooler soils of the valley: the clay rich terraces of the Southern Valleys, the Waihopai and the upper Wairau, rather than the stoniest sauvignon ground. The region's long, bright, cool autumns ripen the fruit while holding acid, and the sea's proximity keeps nights cool even in late summer. The resulting style, at its best, is plump red fruit with a savoury, herbal undertow, softer in tannin than Central Otago's wines and rounder than Martinborough's, with the alcohol typically a half degree kinder. The Southern Valleys subregion, with its heavier soils and cooler nights, makes the structured, darker end of the regional range, and much of the valley's serious pinot now carries that place name.

Sparkling wine remains the variety's other job here. Traditional method bubbly built on pinot noir and chardonnay has been made in the valley since the 1980s, and the same fruit that would make a light red makes a fine base wine, which is why the sparkling guide and this page share their grapes.

How it is made here

The winemaking choices are conservative, as they must be with a grape that gives up its colour reluctantly. Fruit is hand picked or machine picked depending on the estate, cold soaked before fermentation to pull colour without tannin, fermented with a mix of cultured and wild yeasts, and punched down or pumped over gently. Oak is typically French, a proportion new, the barrels small; the maturation runs around a year. The better wines come from lower yielding sites and from the small berry years, when the ratio of skin to juice rises. Nothing about the method is exotic; the differences between bottles come from ground and season, which is the variety's whole philosophy.

The variety's local history is short and practical. Pinot arrived with the first experimental vineyards of the 1970s, spent its early Marlborough decades mostly in sparkling wine and light reds sold at home, and came of age as table wine through the 1990s and 2000s as the Southern Valleys and the Waihopai opened cooler, heavier ground. Clonal choice followed the same path: the early Swiss and Davis selections gave way to the Dijon clones better suited to cool sites, and today's better blocks read like a catalogue of them, 667, 777, 114, 115, each contributing its share of the blend. The region's winemakers are the first to say the search is unfinished, which is the honest reason Marlborough pinot still costs less than its reputation suggests.

Marlborough against the neighbours

The comparison New Zealand drinkers actually make runs across three regions. Central Otago, the world's southernmost wine region of consequence, gives pinot more sun and bigger diurnal swings, and its wines are darker, denser, more obviously extracted, often a degree warmer in alcohol. Martinborough at the bottom of the North Island, one of the country's earliest pinot addresses, makes leaner, more savoury, longer lived wines on older terraces and cooler, windier sites. Marlborough sits between in every dimension, with the softest entry and the most generous fruit, and the argument between the three is really about which virtues a drinker ranks first. All three regions also share the country's advantages: cool climates at latitudes warm regions cannot reach, strict plant material controls, and a preference for screwcaps that keeps the fruit honest.

Buying and keeping

Marlborough pinot is undervalued, which makes it one of the category's better purchases. The step from entry level to estate pinot is usually a few dollars and a real change of site and care, and the estate tier from the Southern Valleys and the cooler vintages rewards cellaring. Age the structured years, from frost thinned or cool seasons; drink the ripe, open years within two or three years while the fruit talks. The windows are given precisely in the cellaring guide, and the seasons themselves in the year by year account.

Serving it fairly

Pinot is served too warm as a rule of New Zealand summers; 14 to 16 degrees is the range, cool cellar rather than room temperature, and an hour in the fridge before a summer dinner fixes most bottles. The glass should be generous, because the nose opens with air. Decanting is rarely needed but an argument in its favour exists for the denser Southern Valleys wines in their first three years. At the table the wine's sweet spot is anything from the region's own larder: lamb, duck, mushroom dishes, salmon; the herbal undertow also makes it one of the few reds that tolerates a beetroot. For the ground and weather behind all of it, the journal's climate and soils guides carry the story.