FOLDING HILL BALLASALLA PINOT NOIR 2024

Winery notes (2024 Vintage)
"Our second tier Pinot Noir that has always over delivered! This wine opens with lifted aromas of redcurrant, raspberry and wild strawberry, layered with hints of rhubarb, dried herbs and subtle spice. The palate is vibrant and finely structured, showing pure red fruit, a gentle mineral thread and savoury undertones. Silky tannins and fresh acidity carry through to a long, textured finish.

Ballasalla means "place of the willows" in Manx Gaelic."

5 Stars & 94/100 Sam Kim, Wine Orbit, March 2026 (2024 Vintage)
"It's splendidly fruited and fragrant on the nose, showing dark cherry, wild strawberry, olive, game, and nutmeg aromas. The palate is equally appealing with succulent fruit intensity, excellent weight, and a silky flow, beautifully supported by fine-grained tannins, finishing lingering and velvety. At its best: now to 2031."

Rated Excellent & 93/100 Cameron Douglas MS, September 2026 (2024 Vintage)
"Aromas and flavours of fresh raspberries and cherries, a sense of site with a stony soil quality framed by layers of wood spice and gentle savoury dried herb core. A dry wine touches the palate with drive from acidity and moderately firm tannins impacts, flavours of red berries and dark cherry flesh, savoury qualities and taut finish. A wine that has Pinosity yet needing a little more time to settle into a rhythm with best drinking from late 2026 through 2030+."

5 Stars & 93/100 Candice Chow, CandiceWineChat.com (2024 Vintage)
"A pleasing Pinot Noir allures with a smooth palate with pliant tannins, redolent of milk chocolate, underlining black fruit and a touch of herb. Excellent value and moreish. Gently full aromas of blackberry, cherry, herb, milk chocolate and black pepper."

Joelle Thomson, September 2026 (2024 Vintage)
"If you’re reading this, you don’t need me to reiterate the fact that Pinot Noir is a difficult customer when it comes to growing it in a vineyard to make wine and sell it at a price that appeals to wine lovers and makes a profit for the producer. But here it is: an affordable Pinot Noir.

Of all the vineyards in Central Otago – and there are many – Folding Hill is one of of a handful (okay, a couple of handfuls) that really speak to the purist in me. It’s a small vineyard site in Bendigo, home nearly entirely to Pinot Noir, with half a hectare of Chardonnay, for good measure.

The brand was established in 2003 by two couples but that’s all history now. One of those couples; Tim and Nikki Kerruish, now own the site, the brand and the wines. Everything is estate-grown, which is an old school way of speaking about authenticity, which is available in spades in these wines. They are even keeping it in the family with the winemaking these days; their son, Matthew, won the latest Central Otago Viticulturist of the Year competition and is making the wines."

If you’ve ever imagined it was an impossibility that a Pinot Noir could be as rewarding, with depth of flavour, for lower prices than, say, a really good Mediterranean village red, think again.

Bendigo, Central Otago and Pinot Noir combine in a single vineyard label that is not marketing itself that way because it’s a humble ‘village’ style of wine offering great value for money and drinkability that is hard to find for devotees of great Pinot Noir.

As Folding Hill’s ‘second’ label, Ballasalla has always offered exceptional depth of flavour – ‘exceptional’ because it is affordable in price for a high quality Pinot Noir. Entirely destemmed, fermented with indigenous yeasts and organically certified with Bio-Gro NZ, this wine spends 11 months in barrels with zero new oak and it’s all the better for it. Pure dark fruit flavours sit in a silky framework with spicy nuances and a freshness that leads the cherry, plum, wild berry flavours to a memorable long finish."