The southernmost vineyards on earth sit among the mountains and gorges of New Zealand's South Island, where a rare pocket of semi-continental climate — hot summer days, frigid nights, brilliant light — lets Pinot Noir ripen where the sea-cooled rest of the country cannot. The result is one of the New World's great Pinot success stories, and it happened in a single generation.
The wines are vivid and pure, with intense dark-cherry fruit, floral lift and firm structure from the schist soils and the altitude. Small, remote and spectacularly beautiful, Central Otago has made Pinot Noir its identity and become a place of pilgrimage for the grape's devotees.