Nose
Medium to deep ruby hue. Condition is bright.
Palate
A floral and scented nose with a bright combination of strawberry, cherries, quince jelly and musk. In the background there are soft oak notes and just a touch of earthiness.
Growing Conditions
The 2015 Moss Wood Pinot Noir was the product of a growing season that was one of our wettest ever. For the record, in calendar year 2014 Mother Nature dumped 1,245 mm of rain on us and we’d like to use this to highlight a little known fact about us. In an era when very few Australian vineyards are dry farmed, both Moss Wood and Ribbon Vale remain unirrigated.
The explanation isn’t difficult to understand if we consider the amount of rain we get. Our average rainfall is 1003mm, significantly wetter than the area where Keith grew up, McLaren Vale in South Australia, where mean annual rainfall is 500mm. Vines get plenty of water from the sky in Margaret River and during the 39 growing seasons Keith has experienced at Moss Wood, the crop has virtually never been adversely affected by drought. Instead, our yields have been limited by events associated with wet conditions – rainfall at the wrong time, hail, heavy winds and so on and the 2015 Pinot is a classic example.
High yield is not a priority at Moss Wood, our emphasis is on quality, so how do we compare? The Australian benchmark for yield, across all varieties, is around 12t/ha (tonnes per hectare) but Moss Wood Pinot Noir yield is 6.3 t/ha. Not unreasonably, people may look at that difference and wonder how lower yielding vineyards could be viable. The answer is in the quality produced – the better the quality the higher the price a wine can achieve in the market. The reality for a cool, wet region like Margaret River is high yields can be a serious threat to quality because we don’t get sufficient warmth to properly ripen big crops, even with an early ripening cultivar like Pinot Noir. The natural irrigation we get from Mother Nature is more than enough to sustain quality yields.
Which leads us back to the 2015 Pinot Noir with its heroically small yield of 3.64 t/ha and a classic example of how our conditions can count against us. We have two clones which flower at slightly different time and results in a flowering period of around 28 days. Through that time in 2014 we had 16 days of rain, for a total of 68mm, all of which disrupted pollination, not to mention the 12 nights where the temperature dropped below 8⁰C causing all recently opened flowers to give up altogether. No surprise that we lost some bunches and those that remained were about half normal weight. Much more important is how the season affected wine quality and the news is all good.
In future, we are sure people will wax lyrical about the last decade of Margaret River vintages and when they do, 2015 will be one of the shining stars. The Pinot Noir enjoyed many hours (949, in fact) in the ideal temperature range of 18-28⁰C and along with that, virtually no extreme heat. The hottest day was 37⁰C and in fact the vines only received 33 hours above 33⁰C, almost verging on too cool.
