Blank Canvas Escaroth Pinot Noir 2020

Reviews

Cameron Douglas MS: 94/100. There’s a unique quality about the bouquet of this wine with a soft floral scents and heirloom red berry fruit fragrances with a fine lightly toasted wood quality and most importantly - a sense of place and time. Youthful and complex. Textures from tannins, wood and acidity touch the palate first with a savoury quality before the flavours of red berries, plums, flowers and red currant. Taut and textured with a youthful energy and drive. Best drinking from mid to late 2024 through 2030+. Keen to try this wine again then.

Bob Campbell, MW: 94/100. Elegant, textural pinot noir with cherry/berry, violet, brambles/grape stems and mixed spice flavours. Supple, high energy wine with latent complexity that needs a little bottle age to reveal. Drinking Window 2023–2031.

Michael Cooper: 5 stars Already very expressive, the 2020 vintage (5*) was hand-harvested from 19 year-old vines at Taylor Pass, in the Southern Valleys, and matured for a year in French oak barriques. Bright ruby, it is a refined, complex wine, very savoury and supple, with deep, ripe cherry, plum and spice flavours, finely integrated oak, and a silky-textured, very harmonious finish. Best drinking 2025+.

Tasting Note

Escaroth Vineyard is a site that truly reflects vintage variation: this year's release simply ticks all the boxes for Pinot Noir fanatics. It has a beguiling, complex perfume that treads both red/blue fruit and an enchanting spice, game and earthy savouriness, with a structured yet elegant tannin framework. As this wine is bottled without filtration, a small amount of natural sediment may form with time.

Aromas and flavours:

Additional information

Type: Red wine

Grape varial: Pinot Noir

Food match: This wine is versatile with food and will pair well with savoury lamb, venison and game dishes, as well as fish dishes such as grilled salmon or tuna. A quintessential match for a vegetarian option is grilled field mushrooms.

Vineyard: Escaroth, Taylor Pass, Marlborough, New Zealand. The very low-yielding vintage (4.6 t/ha) coupled with the dry-farmed nature of the site has resulted in incredible concentration and intensity.

Vintage: 2020 was the second drought year in a trio (2019 - 2021), all of which demanded the use of whole-bunch to ensure balanced extraction and lifted aromatics. The result is a very complex, savoury Pinot Noir with a structured yet elegant tannin framework.

Soils and Climate: These are some of the oldest soils in the region, being very low-vigour clay soils which is perfect for low yielding Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. The north-facing slope means excellent exposure in what is a more extreme climate - with greater diurnal range - than in the main Wairau Valley.

Winemaking: Matt’s time in Burgundy has given him the best of both worlds: he learnt from the region with centuries of knowledge and has combined it with Marlborough’s innate ability to produce blockbuster, perfumed aromatics in an elegant but serious Pinot Noir framework. The handpicked bunches were cold-soaked for 5 days before undergoing spontaneous fermentation by natural yeasts. Matt and Sophie hand-plunged the wine during its ferment which included 50% whole clusters. The wine was pressed to French oak barriques, all of low-toast level (35% proportion new) for 12 months, with a further 3 months in tank to gently and naturally settle. Bottled without filtration.

Recommendation: We recommend to decant this wine.

Alcohol: 13.5% vol

Residual sugar: 0 g/l

Bottle size: 0.75l

Notice: contains sulfites

Cellaring potential: 2029+

Closure: Screwcap

Produced and bottled by: Kiwi-Oeno Limited, t/a Blank Canvas Wines, 2A Opawa Street, Blenheim 7201,Marlborough, New Zealand