Feathertop Pinot Meunier 2023

A variety that’s originating from Champagne and has predominantly been used in France for champagne base. Pinot Meunier is gaining traction rather quickly amongst Pinot drinkers as a stand-alone variety that is light and bright and very quaffable. After joining Feathertop and discovering we had some Pinot Meunier vines I was adamant that we would do a stand-alone variety again instead of picking all our Pinot vines together. The last time we had done this was over a decade ago. Michael and the team was more than happy to individually tag all the vines and hold out until the perfect time for picking- which was about a week later than our normal Pinot picking times. This is the most intense vine babysitting task but it has truly paid off. We bought a whopping 600kg (which is an absolutely tiny amount in winemaking world) into the winery and treated the wine to twice daily punch downs to extract just the right amount of flavour. Post ferment we pressed into two small oak barriques as to achieve some structure in the final product. Six months of lees has softened out the tannin while still retaining fresh vibrancy ! This is the perfect summer red- dried herbs, apricots, and strawberries dominate the nose whilst on the palate it is still light bright and plush ! It’s a great example of what can be achieved with small batch winemaking.