Pyramid Valley Low Burn Estate Chardonnay 2024
£32.25
The wine
The Central Otago Chardonnay from Pyramid Valley, grown on the Low Burn Estate the company bought in 2018 to sit alongside its limestone home farm at Waikari. The vineyard runs beside the Low Burn stream on the western side of the Cromwell basin, on soils left unusually rich in humus by a century and a half of market gardening and irrigation, and it is farmed regeneratively with BioGro organic certification.
Winemaker Huw Kinch handles it in the house manner: hand-picked fruit is whole-bunch pressed and goes straight to barrel with its lees for a wild fermentation, sees only a modest share of new oak, and rests around eleven months in wood before a further spell on fine lees in tank. It is bottled vegan-friendly under screwcap at 14%, from a warmer and more continental site than the North Canterbury wines, and shares the estate with the Lowburn Ferry Pinot Noir.
The producer
Pyramid Valley
View all Pyramid Valley winesMike and Claudia Elze Weersing spent fifteen years looking for the right piece of land before buying this one at Waikari in North Canterbury in 2000. What drew them was limestone, which is rare in New Zealand and which they were convinced was essential for the wines they wanted to make.
The farm sits at altitude in a cool, dry inland valley, and the soils are clay over limestone. Both matter: clay holds water through a dry summer and restrains vigour, limestone gives the drainage and the mineral character. Farming is biodynamic, and the four home blocks, Angel Flower, Earth Smoke, Lion's Tooth and Field of Fire, are named after plants growing among the vines rather than after the family or the view.
Each block is farmed, fermented and bottled separately, which at this scale is an act of conviction rather than commerce. The wines have become some of the most sought-after in New Zealand, and the estate also draws on Central Otago fruit for the Snake's Tongue bottling.
