The Red Square, Pinot Noir, 2005
Our friends Andrew and Madeleine bought a raffle and subsequently won a night of Pinot Noir with a "Wine Educator". And they were nice enough to invite us to participate!
This was the first of five Pinots we had that night. New Zealand, Burgundy, Australia (Tasmania), Oregon, and California -- and in that order. This one was from New Zealand.
I told our wine MC that I had, of course, heard about New Zealand Pinot Noir, and that it was considered the next "hot" place to produce the stuff. However, while I have tried a number of Pinots from the land of the kiwi's, I have yet to actually drink a Pinot I liked. And exacerbating the problem: Pinot's from New Zealand tend to be fairly expensive. No, not as costly as ones from Oregon, but it's hard to gamble something like $20 to $40 bucks on a total mystery.
So, here was another opportunity to find gold down, well, not exactly "under", but down in the southern hemisphere anyway. Disappointingly, well, I was disappointed ... again.
The nose was ... vanilla! Lots of oak here. Past that, there was some rose. The body was light. The flavors reminded me of a lot of that 2005 Pinot from Oregon: it tastes like someone added orange or tangerine juice to the wine. It's just too acidic for my tastes. Under the citrus, there was raspberry and hints of strawberry, but that's about all I got. Denise found a bit more complexity -- fig, bark and dry dirt in there too. The finish was also raspberry, pomegranate, and some of that apple-pucker.
However, this was one of two bottle (out of the five) that still contained wine in them in the morning. And Andrew reported that this wine improved a lot the next night. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to experience that. So I will, necessarily, remain a New Zealand skeptic.
Cost:
Rating:
6.0