Awards & Reviews

... another from this great vintage in Hawke's Bay. It is a powerful wine with ripe concentrated fruit and obvious oak influence, the latter making it less immediately drinkable than some of the wines above.

Pippa MacKay - The Press (4 April 2002)

Loads of tropical fruit aromas with a broad stone and citrus fruit palate and good length. A well balanced wine - a winner with the gymnasts.

Wine X, Issue 7.

Frisky citrus flavours of grapefruit with a dash of butterscotch, mild acid and quiet oak. This Hawke's Bay wine needs another six months to develop into its best. Dry.

Roger Ewer - Greymouth Evening Star (12 Jan 2002)

The 2000 (***½) has a hint of butterscotch on the nose, with good weight, citrus, melon and peach flavours and an appetisingly crisp, lingering finish. It's a subtly oaked wine, fresh, vibrant and well worth cellaring.

Michael Cooper's Buyer's Guide to NZ Wines (Nov 2001)

The standard 2000 version spent six months in French barrels, but only a third of them were new. As a result, no more than a touch of oak spice sits behind the citric aromas.

Vic Williams - Bay of Plenty Times (Sept 2001)

*** Subtly oaked wine, pale yellow, with fresh fruit aromas, clean, lemony flavours, balanced acidity and good weight.

Winestate (Sept 2001)

Hawke's Bay wine, with pineapple, melon and toasty oak aromas and flavours, rich and quite powerful but with some elegance. It's forward wine, enjoyable now, but with the concentration to keep for a few years yet.

Graeme Barrow, syndicated

Young well-spined style of with lots to say already and more to unfold in the complexities area. Excellent structure, perhaps the knowledge that most will be enjoyed fairly quickly has motivated a softness but there is a serious fruit quality which is both enjoyable now and able to unfold. A really nice wine.

Saunders on Wine