Moss Wood 2019 Pinot Noir

Vintage Notes

One of wine’s great attractions is the natural variations in style that come with each new season.  It’s a fascination for both winemakers and consumers.  On the production side, vignerons are mere spectators while Mother Nature goes about her business and as events unfold, we wait to see which new direction we might be going in.  So, it was in 2018/19 growing season.

The fun started right at the beginning, when we had a frost on 16th September.  Luckily for the Pinot Noir, the vineyard is situated high enough in our valley for the cold air to drain away on a frosty night, so no problem there.  However, the cool weather continued right through the full season and the median flowering date for the Pinot Noir was over 2 weeks late on 26th November.  If the days are mild, the nights can be cold and we had 9 days when the temperature dropped below 8°C and indeed, on the 30th November, we had a very cool 2.9°C.  Add to that we had 48mm rain on 8 of the 36 flowering days.  This is not particularly wet but does add insult to the injury caused by the low temperatures.  The net result was bunch weights were down by around 15% and at 5.78 t/ha, likewise the overall yield.

We hoped this might be an end to things but Mother Nature wasn’t yet finished.

At the end of January 2019, she decided to give 68mm of rain and then a further 31mm just before we started picking the Pinot Noir.  This led us into some interesting winemaking.

By the time the rain came, the fruit had ripened to the point where it was changing colour and softening.  Pinot Noir, as always, responds in a way all its own.  The grapes very rarely split but because the berries are tightly clustered, they can tear from the stems.  Many will simply drop off the bunch and when we walk through the vineyard, we find lots of them lying under the vines.  Those that remain in the bunch dry out, leaving quite a few raisins and these, of course, increase the sugar level of the juice.

The complication is, the sound berries that provide the major fruit flavours in the finished wine, remain relatively immature, so, to avoid green notes, we wait until they have reached full flavour maturity before we harvest.  To get the balance right we have to sample regularly and carefully.

This leads to a surprising result, where a cool and slightly wet vintage produces a slightly riper wine but often with the finer, early fruit notes still intact.

When all the boxes were finally ticked, we got under way on 8th March, roughly two weeks later than average, with a ripeness of 14.2 Baume, notably above our average of 13.4.