Saint Clair Tuatara Bay Pinot Noir 2021
£12.95
The wine
Aromas of ripe fresh raspberries and warm red plum are accompanied by subtle hints of dried thyme. Delicious flavours of concentrated red fruits and dried savoury herbs create a fruit-forward, rounded, smooth palate, with a silky tannin structure complementing the long, toasty finish.
Marlborough Pinot Noir is grown in the shadow of Central Otago's reputation but the valley's clay-based hillside sites produce a lighter, more perfumed style that suits the variety well. Tuatara Bay is the second label, made for early drinking, and this is a straightforward, savoury expression rather than an ambitious one.
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.
