Felton Road Pinot Noir Block 5 2016

Nigel Greening purchased Felton Road in 2000, and alongside longtime winemaker Blair Walter has built it into one of the defining producers of New Zealand Pinot Noir, biodynamically certified (Demeter and BioGro) and run on an unwaveringly minimal-intervention philosophy: wild yeast fermentation, wild malolactic, subtle use of new oak, and no fining or filtration anywhere in the range. Block 5 sits on a gentle north-facing slope in the middle of The Elms vineyard, within the Bannockburn sub-region of Central Otago. Soils here vary from heavy loess and silt through clay lake-bed deposits to angular schist gravels, a complexity that gives the wine its distinctive darker, more structured character compared to sibling single-vineyard bottlings. Alongside Block 3, it’s widely regarded as one of Felton Road’s two flagship single-site Pinots. The fruit is handled entirely by gravity, with a portion retained as whole clusters, and the wine typically ages around sixteen months in roughly 25% new French oak.

The result is consistently rated among Central Otago’s most serious, long-lived Pinots: dark cherry, plum and blue fruit meet dried herbs, cracked pepper, baking spice and a hint of minty, toasted oak, with real tannic grip and structure beneath the fruit.