2015 Pegasus Bay Prima Donna Aged Release Pinot Noir, Waipara

This is stunningly beautiful. Complex bouquet, sumptuous on the palate with rich texture and flowing mouthfeel, offering awesome power and well as elegance …”

97 points Sam Kim for Wine Orbit (original vintage release)

Grand, majestic and complex pinot noir that has an expansive, entrancing style. Black and red cherries, plums, earthy notes, woody spices and a wealth of pot-pourri and forest-floor complexity. Deep, flavorsome dark fruit, long, succulent tannins and an expansive, rising finish. Superb! Good aging potential. 

96 points James Suckling, September 2018 (original vintage release)

Rich, concentrated and quite savoury pinot noir with plum, dark berry, violet and spicy oak flavours amongst the more obvious descriptors of this very complex wine. Firmly-structured but accessible. Worth cellaring for a few years to integrate flavours and develop texture.

96 points Bob Campbell for The Real Review, February 2019 (original vintage release)

One of the best vintages for this wine (maybe the best?), the 2015 Prima Donna Pinot Noir seamlessly marries dark, earthy, savory complexity with bright red fruit that hints at pie cherries, raspberries and cranberries. Sous-bois, humus and dried spices lead the way, later yielding to the bright fruit. Medium to full-bodied, it's round and supple in the mouth, then gains focus and length on the velvety-textured finish. Drink to 2030.

94 points Joe Czerwinski, August 2019 (original vintage release)

The 2015 Prima Donna Pinot Noir has an attractive bouquet displaying much more precision and definition than the regular Pinot Noir and featuring red cherries, rose petals and a touch of violet. The palate is well balanced, offering gentle grip, quite edgy tannin, good weight in the mouth and an almost Morey-like finish. Very fine, but it needs a couple of years in bottle to smooth those edges. Drink to 2030.

91 points Neal Martin for Vinous, June 2018 (original vintage release)

Planted from 1985 onwards, the Pegasus Bay vineyard sits in Waipara Valley, a 45-minute drive north of Christchurch on New Zealand’s South Island. It enjoys protection from the Pacific’s easterly breezes, a prolonged ripening period with substantial diurnal temperature variations. The alluvial Glasnevin gravel soils here are free draining and low in fertility, resulting in naturally reduced vine vigour.

The Donaldson family, viticultural pioneers in the region, remain the owner-operators of Pegasus Bay. Minimal intervention at all stages from vine to bottle typifies the winemaking approach: sustainable viticultural management, low crop levels, minimal handling of fruit, natural malolactic fermentation and clarification by settling, without the use of fining agents. All wines are made from estate grown fruit.

Prima Donna forms part of the Pegasus Bay Reserve tier of wines. These are made in exceptional years when the additional selection of barrels for a best of the vintage blend is deemed not to compromise the quality of the estate tier of wines.

The cooler than average spring that started the 2015 season reduced yields but a warm summer and lingering autumn allowed for optimal ripeness.

Fruit for the Pegasus Bay Pinot Noir wines are picked at various stages of maturity to allow the wines to display a wide range of red and dark fruit flavours. Approximately one third of the grapes are put at the bottom of the fermentation vessels as whole bunches, with the balance destemmed on top, retaining as many whole berries as possible. The fermenters are kept cool for the first days to extract soft and silky tannins from the skins. The must is allowed to ferment naturally, with gentle plunging of the cap twice daily, and allowed to steep for a week to extract a range of tannins for structure and depth. The wines are then gently pressed into oak barriques of which 30% are renewed each vintage. After roughly 18 months, a selection of the best barriques are chosen and blended to produce the Prima Donna when the quality of the vintage supports a release.

Prima Donna Pinot Noirs are built for the long haul. The Aged Release program sees these being released at ten years of age as they enter their prime drinking window, but with years of further cellaring potential. The wines retain some of the initial raspberry and cherry characters as they age, but floral and spicy aromas come to the fore, with generous and concentrated flavours ranging from subtle plum to dried fruit, Christmas cake and toffee with deep smoky notes.

A special occasion wine this complex and layered deserves some food that doesn’t compete and acts more as an echo chamber of the wine’s bouquet and flavours: Tajarin pasta tossed in butter with freshly shaved black truffles, wood-fired Peking duck or a Moroccan pastilla.