This is an excellent value Wairarapa Pinot Noir. The grapes are carefully selected to create a great New Zealand Pinot with a medium body and a fruit forward and complex palate.  

This exciting Alexandra Pinot Noir is made from grapes grown on warm, north facing slopes across the Clutha River from Alexandra township on Earnscleugh Road on a site that was known for the early establishment of grape vines in the 1870s during the goldrush. It's the area of Central Otago that most attracted the shareholders, a group of friends who collectively own the vineyard and Grasshopper Rock wine brand.

Pinot Noir is the only wine they produce and theirs has a history of exceptionally elegant aging, thanks to its high acidity (a direct expression of the cool climate here) and its savoury, earthy flavours as it develops in the bottle.

This wine drinks beautifully now and has a long life ahead, for those with willpower. 

This wine is made exclusively with hand harvested fruit from the Blackenbrook Home block where the vines grow on Moutere clay soil covered by a layer of sandy loam. The wine making is extremely gentle with whole bunch pressing, cool fermentation, minimal pumping over and using gravity to move the wine when required.

12% of the wine is aged in oak to add mouthfeel and complexity and there is no fining pre-bottling.

 At 5g/l of residual sugar this is dry in style.

Tasting Notes
Intensely varietal, our Gewurztraminer 2018 is marked by a delightful scent of rose petals, Turkish delight and spice followed by a lingering off-dry finish.
Ideal serving temperature: 15 degrees

4 Stars Michael Cooper
A consistently attractive wine. Pale and ripely perfumed, it is
mouthfilling and vividly varietal, with fresh pear, lychee and
spice flavours, showing very good delicacy and depth, and a
dryish, smooth

Un-oaked Chardonnay made with grapes sourced from throughout the Central Otago region and exhibiting the region's natural elegant fruit flavours and mineral complexity. The wine is fermented in tank to retain its bright fruit and is left to rest on its yeast lees to gain some doughy complexity and softness. This is a refreshing full-bodied wine, unencumbered by oak and superb with food.

Winemaker Kevin Judd makes one of Marlborough's best Chardonnays every year and this one is full bodied with intense ripe flavours of grapefruit, burnt orange and white nectarine, which mingle with savoury aromas of smoked almonds, hazelnut meringue and the heady fragrance of freshly cut hay. The mealy savouriness carries through onto a rich, textural palate, evidence of this wine?s low-intervention winemaking. An intricate bone-dry style that is highly concentrated with a distinct flintiness, tight structure and crisp citrussy finish.

The 2018 Grand Amateur Merchant is a fresh, cool climate red made exclusively from one of Hawkes Bays most exciting Cabernet Franc vineyards - The Howell Family Vineyard. In the tradition of the finest barrel aged Loire Cabernet Francs where Sam worked for 6 years, this fresh, elegant and perfumed red will reward patient wine lovers for 8-9 years from the vintage. Blueberries, raspberries, Damson plums, dried thyme and background cedar notes from oak ageing.

This distinguished Cabernet Merlot is made from ultra-premium grapes (73% Cabernet Sauvignon, 23% Merlot, 4% Cabernet Franc) grown on low-yielding vines in the Mere Road Vineyard, situated in the celebrated stony soils of the Gimblett Gravels district in Hawkes Bay. Medium to full bodied, it bursts with notes of black fruits, plum, chocolate, and liquorice intertwined with beautifully refined tannins, yielding a distinguished silky smooth wine.

This bold and beautiful McLaren Vale Shiraz puts the region's best foot forward - and the grape's most vibrant, peppery flavours forward too, in the glass. It's named after winery owner Frank Mitolo's three children, Gemma, Alex and Marco and is a deliciouly dark and spicy red with deep earthy notes. 

The wine is made from vineyards at the south end of McLaren Vale, which provides ripe but balanced dark flavours of powerful black cherries, black plums and strong notes of cinnamon, nutmeg and spice. Winemaker Ben Glaetzer says he picks grapes on flavour ripeness to make wines with mature tannins and vibrant fruit both being key characteristics of Mitolo wines. 

He describes GAM Shiraz as opulent, robust and multi layered; an ideal match for rustic foods.

It comes from the Lopresti vineyard, which is about three kilometres east of the coastal town of Port Willunga.

Winemaker Ben Glaetzer describes this wine as: "Full bodied and dense, the palate provides layers of ripe black fruits that open up endlessly. Firm, ripe tannins amply support the rich and opulent black fruit characters with the earthy background notes contributing further complexity. It is an ample and very classic expression of McLaren Vale Shiraz."

Lovely plush Shiraz with peppery notes and bold plum flavours in a full bodied, beautiful expression of South Australia's most popular and most widely planted red grape. Dry, impressive and long on flavour. This wine will age for at least seven to eight years. 

Langmeil is owned by the Lindner family, which has been making wine for six generations in the Barossa Valley.

Now owned by the renowned sherry producer Gonzalez Byass, Bodegas Beronia was created in 1973 by a wine and food club and is now considered a benchmark Rioja house.

A deep picota cherry red colour with a garnet edge, this wine is clean and bright. It is complex on the nose, with aromas of cherry and raspberry standing out, complemented by herbal notes - rosemary and thyme - and hints of cinnamon and tobacco. Very fresh and tantalising on the palate, this wine displays a plethora of flavours, the most prominent of which are the confected notes of vanilla and chocolate.

Spritzy young dry Riesling with layers of citrus and liquid honey flavours. Clean and fresh with lemony flavours to burn. It tastes dry, medium bodied and represents delicious drinking now or as a great contender for the cellar. 

Sealed with a screwcap – so this is a no brainer for the long haul in your wine cellar.

 Weingut von Winning was founded in 1849 and revived as a family enterprise in 2007 by the late Achim Niederberger, who brought winemaker Stephan Attman on board to make high quality Rieslings, practicing organic viticulture in its Grosses Gewächs vineyards around the villages of Ruppertsberg, Deidesheim and Forst. 

Txakoli, pronounced cha-coal-ee is a lightly sparkling, dry white wine from the north of Spain, made to drink while it's young (typically within a year of bottling). Its high acidity  and low alcohol make it taste clean, fresh and zingy. It's made from the rare Hondarrabi Zerratia grape, which is a relative of the French white grape, Petit Manseng, which is found not too far north of here in southern France. 

Honey meets candied lemon zest. Deliciously intense sweet Riesling with aromas of limes, green apples and ripe apricots. This is a stellar dessert wine and, we think, even better with your favourite soft cheese.

Whitehaven Wines began life in 1994 as a romantic business for a couple of corporate escapees, Sue and Greg White, who had given up life in the rat race of Auckland for another kind of life aboard their yacht. When sailing around the country, they took shelter in the Marlborough Sounds from Pacific storms and fell in love with the region. An easy thing to do when harbouring in the spectacularly pristine waters of the Sounds. They decided to settle there on terra firma once more and try their hands at wine production, hiring a winemaker and beginning a business which has now been around for 26 years. Greg has sadly passed away now, leaving a legacy as well as his wife and daughter, Sam, to run the winery. Their winemaker is Peter Jackson.

Succulent blend of two great white grapes originally from Bordeaux in south west France and now put to deliciously intense use in this sweet, raisony and super concentrated luscious white wine. Botrytis plays a strong role in this delicious wine with its lingering flavours and deep, full body. 

Made from riesling hand-picked from the same vines multiple times in late autumn, choosing only the most beautifully noble botrytic fruit on each occasion. Further hand selection was done in the winery retaining only the best berries. These were gently pressed and a small amount of very rich juice at 45 brix was obtained. It was allowed to settle and the clarified portion was then fermented over many months at low temperatures in order to help retain its special aromas and flavours. The juice was so concentrated that when the fermentation stopped it still had a rich, natural sweetness. It was made in the style of an Alsatian Selection de Grains Nobles or a German Trockenbeerenauslësen.

The wine is a bright lemon-gold colour. The abundant aromas and flavours evoke impressions of ripe cantaloupe melon, mango, pineapple, lychees, and manuka honey. On the palate, the wine is rich and unctuous. Underneath this, however, there is a streak of minerality and fine acidity that keep it fresh, lively and refined, drawing out its lingering after flavours.

Source - Pegasus Bay