Pinot Noir - 2010 Vintage

This Pinot Noir from this vintage did not show well. Too many wines were too big and clumsy and, I suspect, a number had been drained of their free-run juice to raise the level of extraction by increasing the ratio of skins to juice. Some of these had also had undergone tannin removal and were over-fined in order to make the oversized wines drinkable earlier, only all this achieved was to make them oversized and underpowered. As James Halliday wrote in the judges' comments: Pinot Noir should have elegance and length, not weight and concentration, as its mission statement. Having said that, there were a small number of significantly superior wines and, of all those, the very best for me was Pressing Matters, although by consensus the truly excellent Tower Estate Panorama Vineyard was Top Gold. The two wines that came closest to Pressing Matters, as far as I was concerned, were Hardy's Eileen Hardy (soft, silky and brimming with finesse) and Dawson & James (long, delicious, salivating Pinot Noir fruit supported by extremely elegant oak, but it received silver, not gold, because I could not quite persuade Tim James to come up high enough for his own wine!). I must also single out another gold, Stoney Rise Holyman (lovely, fresh Pinot fruit with just enough immaculate tannins to make it a must with food) and a bronze that should have been at least a top silver to my mind, the Riversdale Estate Grown (an extremely elegant wine with a gentle richness of Pinot Noir fruit). I agree with all the golds and silvers, but 42ºS, Bream Creek and Milton are three bronze medal winners that should have got a silver, and I will even go out to bat for an unmedalled wine, Kate Hill, which I found very European in style, requiring time in bottle (if you have good storage conditions, buy it and wait until it receives a gold medal further downstream because I have no doubts whatsoever - it will)..