Thursday, June 25, 2009

Felton Road Block 5 Pinot Noir 2007 Central Otago


This is an absolute belter!

Felton Road is one of my favourite wines easy. Year in and year out these guys from Central Otago in NZ produce some fantastic wine, and not just Pinot Noir – Pinot Gris, Chardonnay and a wonderfully dry Riesling.

Central Otago has unfortunately got a reputation of producing over-ripe berryie Pinot Noir wines. I believe this is unfounded or it is a generalist view held by people who have far too much spare time on their hands.

For me, the wine is near perfect – very Burgundy like I would have to say. The 2007 Block 5 Pinot Noir is fantastic baby, or mucho fantastico for our latin friends!!! This wine shares its name with another one of my favourites, Bindi Block 5 Pinot Noir and, like the shared name, this wine is all elegance and lust rolled into one fine vessel.

Onto the wine then. The Felton Road Block 5 2007 Pinot Noir has got a deep red going on which sort of tells me that there was plenty of time on skins to extract both wonderful colour and flavour. The nose is complex with musk stick, rose petal, prickly spice with a little bit of cassia bark and plum after a while. In the mouth there is more musk stick with a little bit of green leaf rhubarb thrown in. The longer in the glass, the wine delivers an elegance that I am used to with this producer; soft spicy acid with a wonderful grainy mouth feel which makes it perfect with food such as spiced duck or rare beef for all of that acid to soak up the blood.

Beautiful balance, plenty of length, wonderfully complex and as said before, great weight to go up against strong flavours on the plate.

Drink till 2020
Drink with roast duckling with Asian spices.
19/20

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