Pinot Noir Marlborough 2020 – Tinpot Hut

To produce the Pinot Noir Marlborough Tinpot Hut, the fruit was picked at optimum ripeness and carefully transported to the winery for de-stemming and chilling. Each vineyard parcel was kept separate in small open-top fermenters and cold soaked to extract maximum flavour and colour stability. The wine was fermented using a mixture of selected yeast strains and hand plunged up to six times a day. Each parcel went through malolactic fermentation and was aged on light lees in a mixture of new and old French oak and stainless steel tanks before being blended, stabilised, lightly egg white fined and prepared for bottling.

The Pinot Noir grapes were sourced from a well-tended, low yielding hillside vineyard in the Omaka Valley sub-region in Marlborough. The soils are clay-based and the vines are north and west facing.

Tinpot Hut wines are made primarily from fruit grown on winemaker Fiona Turner’s vineyard in Blind River. Fiona, who has worked with Matt Thomson for a number of years, supplements her own grapes with fruit from other growers in Marlborough and Hawkes Bay. The tinpot hut that gave its name to Fiona’s wines is an old mustering hut in the remote hills between the Wairau and Awatere Valleys. The huts were used as a base for musterers as they rounded up the sheep that had been in the hills from spring to autumn. The name links Marlborough’s past as a sheep farming centre with its current state as one of the world’s most dynamic wine regions.