Saint Clair Origin Pinot Noir 2025
£15.25
The wine
Aromas of ripe red berries are interlaced with spice and blackcurrant bud. The palate is full and rich, with flavours of vibrant red berries layered with warm, spiced fruit and savoury oak through to a silky finish.
The Origin Pinot Noir draws on several Marlborough sites, mainly the clay-rich hillsides on the southern side of the Wairau where the variety performs best. Pinot Noir is the region's second grape by plantings and by some distance the more difficult, thin-skinned and prone to disease, which is why site selection matters more here than with Sauvignon.
The producer
Saint Clair
View all Saint Clair winesNeal and Judy Ibbotson planted their first vines in Marlborough in 1978, when the region had barely a handful of growers and no reputation whatsoever. For sixteen years they sold their fruit to others. Saint Clair Family Estate was founded in 1994, named after James Sinclair, the pioneer who first drained and farmed the land they had bought.
The estate now owns around 160 hectares across ten separate Marlborough locations, chosen deliberately for how different they are from one another. The Wairau valley floor, the cooler and windier Awatere to the south, and the hillside sites in between all ripen at different rates and give quite different wines from the same grape.
That variation is the point of the Pioneer Block series. Rather than blending everything into one house style, individual parcels are bottled and numbered separately, so Block 1 Foundation, Block 3 43 Degrees and Block 14 Doctor's Creek can be tasted against one another. Few producers anywhere offer so clear a demonstration that Marlborough is not one flavour, and the wines have collected an extraordinary run of trophies doing it.
