Te Mata Bullnose Syrah, Hawkes Bay

Description

Te Mata Bullnose Syrah is a red wine from New Zealand’s North Island. Te Mata was established in 1896 and remains family owned today. All of the wines are estate produced.

All Te Mata Estate wines are produced exclusively from their own Hawke’s Bay vineyards. The Syrah for this wine comes from the estate’s Bullnose, Hotspur and Isosceles Vineyards. The Bullnose and Isosceles vineyard are located in the Bridge Pa Triangle, an area that sees some of the hottest summer temperatures in Hawke’s Bay. This long dry heat, combined with free-draining sandy loam over a gravel base, make this a superb site for ripening grapes and, in particular, Syrah. The 15 hectare Bullnose Vineyard was planted in 1990 and is also home to winemaker Peter Cowley and his family.

The grapes for the Te Mata Bullnose Syrah are processed lot by lot, they are hand-harvested, destemmed and given a traditional warm-plunged fermentation. The resulting wines undergo extended maceration on skins before pressing and then a secondary malolactic fermentation. The separate wines were then run to a mixture of new and seasoned French oak barriques for 14 months’ maturation. During this time, they were regularly topped and racked, before egg-white fining, blending and then bottling in October 2020.

Vineyard partners Michael Morris and Peter Cowley named Bullnose after an early Morris Cowley car, nicknamed Bullnose due to its distinctive radiator. The bull emblem that appears on the label is drawn from the car’s radiator crest.