Saint Clair Pioneer Block 15 Strip Block Pinot Noir 2022
£17.95
The wine
An elegant and perfumed wine with bright red cherry and red berry fruit flavours. The palate has a rich, round mouthfeel with silky tannins and a touch of charry oak on the finish.
Strip Block takes its name from its long, narrow shape. As with the rest of the Pioneer Block series, it is kept separate from vine to bottle rather than blended, so what reaches the glass is one parcel's character. Marlborough Pinot Noir is at its best in this register: bright red fruit and fine tannin rather than weight.
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.
