High praise for Mountford Pinot- July 2010

MoneyWeek, 30 July 2010 - 2006 Mountford Estate Pinot Noir, Waipara, New Zealand

 Posted by Matthew in Uncategorized on 07 30th, 2010 | no responses

2006 Mountford Estate Pinot Noir, Waipara, New Zealand (£30.95, www.slurp.co.uk).  Some of the world’s finest Pinots come from a small, virtually unknown, boutique wine region called Waipara, in the South Island of New Zealand.  Heroic names like Pyramid Valley, Bell Hill and Pegasus Bay are already on the shrewdest of collectors’ lists - their wines are staggeringly serious, but they all stay well under the radar.  Making tiny quantities of wine, like their great Burgundian counterparts, these three masterful estates already have a messianic following, but in spite of a number of new wineries popping up in this region over the last decade or so, no one else has reached these heights apart from Mountford.  This incredible estate is set to rock the palates of the wine cognoscenti.  Berry Bros (tel. 0800 280 2440) has the 2007 vintage and slurp.co.uk has the 2005 and 2006, apparently, so you could conceivably assemble a mini-vertical tasting and see for yourself just how beautiful and full of vitality and class CP Lin’s wines are.  I visited him in February and tasted a massive line up of bottles and every single one was utterly captivating.  There are very few wineries which have yet to be ‘discovered’ these days, particularly in the Pinot Noir field (the most difficult and sensitive of all), but I can say for certain that Mountford is teetering on the edge of superstardom.