2015 Escarpment Kupe Pinot Noir Martinborough

Wine Spectator’s #1 Pinot of the Year

The 2015 Escarpment Kupe Pinot Noir is Wine Spectator’s #1 Pinot of the year, beating out some of the world’s best, including Beaux Frères, Bergström, Evening Land, and Brick House. “This powerful wine is tightly wound yet very expressive,” raved Spectator with 96 points, adding: “Everything sings in harmony on the long finish.” James Suckling went one higher with 97 points, praising it as “an extremely luscious wine, bathed in ripe darker cherry and plum fruit flavors…Brilliant.” Here’s the best part: in a Wine Access online exclusive, we’re offering this marvel of Martinborough power and finesse for just $45 a bottle—nearly half off the price of competing wines. If you love Pinot Noir packed with New World lushness and chewy tannins, we have 65 cases to go around. Released at $72, we have it for 37% off at just $45 per bottle on six or more.

We, along with many of the world’s wine critics, can say without hesitation that Escarpment is New Zealand’s best Pinot Noir producer, bar none. The reputation of Escarpment winemaker Larry McKenna is such that Australian Wine Companion’s James Halliday nicknamed him the “Prince of Pinot” (others prefer “McPinot”). His flagship 2013 Kupe was the first NZ Pinot ever made to crack the elite top ten of Wine Spectator’s Top 100 List. Craggy-featured and self-effacing in person, in the cellar and in the vineyard McKenna is an artist of the first order, endowing his wines with a complexity and richness that can only be found elsewhere in Burgundy.

Indeed, Burgundy has always served as McKenna’s reference point. What drew him to Martinborough Vineyard in 1986 as winemaker were the similarities the cool-climate region showed to the world-famous terroir of the Côte de Nuits. And when he went on to start Escarpment and begin putting vines in the soil in 1999, he pioneered high-density planting in Martinborough, using similar spacing—roughly 3,350 vines per acre—as in Burgundy.

McKenna knew he wanted his plots located on the Martinborough Terraces, whose deep, gravel, alluvial soils are highly prized in the area. The high-density planting creates an ideal expression of the Abel clone, which gathers tremendous power and structure through a long growing season defined by moderate, dry summers, in which temperatures rarely climb above 85F. Over time, one parcel of Pinot vines in particular stood out; according to McKenna, even the pickers, whose knowledge of viticulture was more intuitive than technical, came out of the fields to tell him that the fruit there was something special. That plot became the Kupe vineyard, and the start of Escarpment’s landmark single-vineyard series.

In 2015, which James Suckling called a “perfect harvest,” dry, low-yield conditions ensured that McKenna’s Pinots reached a new pitch in concentration, while exhibiting a harmony and integration to reign all that intensity in. The Kupe release was the star of the show, and those able to snag Wine Spectator’s #1 Pinot of the year will be able to savor it over the course of the next decade, and then some.

• Fruit Intensity
• Oak Intensity
• Body
• Acidity
• Tannin

• ABV 13.50%
• 30 mins
• Now – 2030
• % Pinot Noir
• Serving temperature – 60°
• Screw cap