Pyramid Valley Low Burn Estate Pinot Noir 2024
£32.25
The wine
Pyramid Valley’s Central Otago Pinot Noir, from the Low Burn Estate the company bought in 2018. The house style here runs to fleshy black cherry and raspberry with spice and dried herbs behind, denser and more opulent than the limestone-grown North Canterbury wines, but with the freshness and structure to reward keeping.
The Low Burn Estate sits 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, with some of the oldest Pinot Noir vines in Central Otago, planted in 2002. That contrast with the clay-over-limestone home farm at Waikari is the point: the site gives a second, quite different expression of Pinot Noir alongside the North Canterbury wines. It is farmed regeneratively with BioGro organic certification, the fruit picked by hand, fermented with indigenous yeasts and bottled without filtration.
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.
