About us - Brodie Estate - wine, accommodation, art

Brodie Estate – single vineyard, boutique winery
A small family owned vineyard  based in Martinborough in the lower North Island.
• Martinborough was the first place to grow Pinot Noir successfully in New Zealand.
• Special climate, low rainfall, good heat in the summer but rarely above 31 degrees.
• Long warm autumns with little rain and cool nights – perfect Pinot growing climate
• Terroir – silts over clays, then an iron-pan with tight gravels below
• Martinborough Pinot has similar phenolics to Central Otago Pinot except Martinborough wines have one less of the fruity characteristics and two or more that express forest floor, savoury and mushroom characteristics.
Our vineyard was planted in 2001,
8 acres of Pinot Noir Dijon clones – 777,667,114,115, Clone 5.
777 clone has chocolate characteristics,
Clone 5 brings spices,
667 provides the full mouth characteristic
We blend them all together to produce our single estate wine.
Plants are grown without irrigation, they depend on what comes down from up above.  This leads to plants that put their energy into the fruit and not into the vegetation
We produce small succulent berries with intense fruit flavours and savoury characteristics
We wait until the grape is truly ripe, This means the brix (sugar levels)  levels are often around 25 to 26 brix. The aim is to produce ripe fruit with a medium alcohol level.
We aim to produce 1000 cases of high quality pinot noir each year.

Winemaking Process
Grapes are hand picked, immediately de-stemmed without crushing the berries and placed into small fermenters ( 1 to 1/12 tonne each). The grape juice is chilled down over two days and then allowed to slowly commence fermentation.  We use commercial yeasts chosen for their characteristics. We don’t allow wild yeast fermentation. We use two selected yeasts picked for their specific characteristics.
The fermentation begins about five to six days after picking. Temperature is controlled to ensure that fermentation doesn’t go over 31 degrees.
We plunge the cap four times a day, late at night and early in the morning. After fermentation is completed we let the wine soak until the cap drops which takes about five to six days. We then decant by hand into the press. It takes around three hours to press one full basket in our small basket press. We stop pressing once the degree of bitterness from the marc is becoming pronounced.  The wine is settled in tank and then transferred to French Gillet oak barrels , one third new, one third are one or two years old and the remainder three to five years. The barrels are medium toasted and give a structure and body to the wine without overwhelming any of its components. After 11 months the wine is filtered and bottled. No other additions are made to the wine apart from a very small amount of sulphur when the grapes are first de-stemmed. We are not certified as organic, but, apart from the use of some roundup for weed control, we don’t use any sprays that are not organically registered.

The Wine Itself:
The processes that we use results in a wine with soft tannins and a silky, sensuous expression, full in the mouth but still with good acid structure and good length. The bouquet opens gradually as the bottle stands.