The vineyard

Back in 2010 I did a couple of posts featuring my friend CP Lin, winemaker at Mountford Estate winery, located at Waipara just north of Christchurch.

The post where I introduced CP is here:  Of CP Lin, Food & Wine Matches

Here’s where I shared some international opinion on CP’s wine: Wine Wow

And last year we made an Earth Day Visit To Wine Country

All good stuff!

But last week I received the following excellent news–that the 2009 Mountford Estate Pinot Noir came out in the top 3 at a blind tasting for the Wall Street Journal.  Fantastic, huh? (Even more fantastic, I have some in the cupboard–I mean, ‘cellar.’ 😉 )

And London’s Bordeaux Index believes that Mountford Estate’s ‘The Gradient” may just be “one of the very best Pinot Noirs on the planet.”

BI also said about the Mountford wines in general;

“… we now agree with Matthew Jukes that “every single one was utterly captivating”.  We usually leave out the boring technical details like de-budding (reducing the number of buds/grapes on the vine to increase the concentration of the remaining grapes) and de-suckering (reducing the irrigation of the vines again increasing concentration by stressing the vines), but with these wines the winemaking practices really are key to their mind-blowing quality. Every single aspect of the winemaking is completed to the most exacting standards of Chief Winemaker C.P. Lin including foot pressing the grapes himself and use of 100% new French oak for 20 months; all expensive, labour intensive and time consuming processes, but with absolutely stunning effects. In the words of Matthew Jukes “Mountford is teetering on the edge of superstardom”, and the highlight for us was the single vineyard Pinot Noir “The Gradient”. [emphasis BI’s]

So there you g0—I would call these very serious tributes indeed, most particularly to CP as a winemaker, but also to the Mountford Estate owners, Kathryn Ryan and Kees Zeestraten and the rest of the Mountford Estate team, and also to the Waipara ‘terroir’ (if it is not pretentious of me to use the term.)