Winemakers Tasting Notes
2005 Ventifacts Block

Here we are looking at the newly bottled 2005 vintage. 2005 was a fantastic year for us. Lovely warm weather to deliver nice fruit characters and good development of tannins. Lets take a look at what you are about to experience.

Beginning with the aromas …… nice bright red raspberry, cranberry fruit tones, luscious ripe cherries, also mineralality and spices going off to white pepper with a little bit of brown cloves and cocoa powder.

Looking to the pallet now ……. immediately we have a lot of big dark luscious cherries, with the flavor progressing across the pallet, to leave a good mid pallet. This is a full bodied Pinot Noir which is what I like to make.

Finishing in the end of the pallet with a little bit of dark chocolate and a very nice finish. Maybe a little bit of tariness in the finish as well.

We find that the bright fruit tones are a production of the yeast. It is the yeast that takes what’s in the fruit and transforms it into the aromas we smell. The unique part of the mineralality and the spicy tones that we see with the wine, is coming from the very different soils we grow the vines on. We get the concentrations and flavor here in Alexandra, where we are on a very shallow sand and gravel base with pebbles underneath. We tend to get a lot of mineral tones from this and these concentrations are passed to the wine.

One of the things I also find that I enjoy about making Pinot Noir is trying to get a good sized and also fully colored Pinot. When we look at the Pinot we see a really pretty dark color to it.

Pinots can have may different expressions. They can be lighter colored, more floral and not quite as fickle in the body and then they can also be bigger darker and fuller bodied. With the two types there are the more floral ones you usually can drink a little bit earlier and it doesn’t have the aging capabilities as the more fuller bodied one. The full bodied one will go really well with venison and lamb and actually one of my favorite dishes is having New Zealand lamb with wild thyme that grows around here in the vineyard. Thyme itself puts out a lot of unique characteristics in that it has an oil in it. On a hot day as you walk through the vineyard you can smell the oil up off the plants. You cannot help but wonder if that attributes to some of
the savory characteristics that we see in Drumsara Pinot Noir.

Gerry Rowland
Wine Maker

Download Tasting Notes and Statistics (pdf)