Felton Road - MacMuir Pinot Noir 2023

The Wine Front

Cameron Douglas MS

I really do feel that these Pinot Noir vines love the soil they grow in, there’s a lovely core of fruit and sense of site, the bouquet is alluring, new and vibrant. Scents of dark berries and baking spices, clay and dry earth, some dark roses and black cherry. A very taut frame as the wine touches the palate, tannins are ripe and in abundance, acidity brings in mouthfeel and freshness, flavours and salinity. A delicious and complex wine with a quiver and vibrato, it just needs cellar time with best drinking from 2030 through 2040+.

Vinous

The 2023 Pinot Noir MacMuir is sweetly fruited, finely fragrant and herbal, reflecting a portion of whole bunch fermentation (25%). Fine, sinewy and deeply tannic, there is a real sense of real grip on the long, plummy, spiced fruitcake finish. This is not one for opening too soon. It needs time.

Robert Parker Wine Advocate

The 2023 MacMuir Pinot Noir leads with cocoa powder and pomegranate, dried herbs and caper brine. The palate offers all of this and more, framed by fine, chalky tannins and a wash of juicy acidity that feels watercolor like and impressionist in the mouth. I like this wine very much, and the slightly lighter frame this year works well for it. It is chewy and good, with asphalt and petrichor through the finish. 13.5% alcohol, sealed under screw.

James Suckling

Savory and brooding aromas of dark cherries, blackberries, ferric earth, blood oranges and cedar on the nose. The palate has finely integrated tannins and a medium bodied mouthfeel, giving notes of raspberry coulis, graphite and watermelon rind. Refined and pure with an underlying power. Drink or hold.

Halliday Wine Companion

A deeply fruited, inviting aromatic profile showing fruit tones of raspberry coulis, dark plum, cherry clafoutis and cranberry with underlying hints of fine spice, violets, earth, rose petal, cinnamon and ground stone. There is a calm generosity in this wine; perhaps a little darker in fruit than some of its brethren/ sistren with its canvas of ripe fruits stretched taut on a framework of fine kinetic tannins and a sweep of saline, sapid acidity that provides ample cadence and illumination. These 2023 Feltons are in fine form indeed.