ORATERRA PINOT NOIR 2023

Winery notes (2023 Vintage)
"A nose of fresh plums and cherry blossoms allude to this wine’s delicate fruit aromatics. The details are found by spending time with the wine, allowing it to open up and show the warmer side with vanilla and leather. The palate is subtle but complex with finely-spread tannins. Open and calm at the front, acidity draws the wine inwards in the middle before it shifts its weight towards the back palate, where it closes in with a combination of fruit and oak flavours. This is an intriguing, lighter-bodied style of wine that doesn’t readily give away its secrets. To define this wine requires time in order to get to know the complexities and layers that are in store.

We harvest all our fruit by hand into small tubs. The fruit is sorted the following day, cold, and is all destemmed into 900kg ferment vessels. We let the newly filled vessels acclimatise and warm so that a natural fermentation occurs. An occasional hand plunge helps to keep the ferments happy and homogenous. After between 14 and 20 days in the fermenting vessel, we pressed the wines and transferred them to large format barrels, 300 and 500 litres, for 12 months. After racking, settling and blending it was bottled unfined and unfiltered."

94/100 Emma Jenkins MW, Decanter UK, August 2024 (2023 Vintage)
"Oraterra is the new venture of Wilco Lam, formerly chief winemaker at Dry River Wines. In 2022 he assembled a crack team of colleagues and backed by a family of German wine-and-NZ-lovers, purchased Martinborough winery, On Giants’ Shoulders, with a well-established dry-farmed, certified organic vineyard. The 2023 Pinot Noir launches the new brand and label, and while not the easiest year to navigate, Lam has kept a light hand and delivered an elegant, savoury, spicy wine with delicate brambly berry fruit and fine sappy tannins, that combines minerally earthiness with an energetic brightness. One to watch."