We held the Coldfoot back fourteen months

The 2022 Coldfoot Pinot Noir was due for release in March 2025. It was on the price list. It was on forty-one members’ orders. The labels were printed. In January we tasted it for the last time before bottling, and we decided not to sell it.

It goes on sale today, fourteen months late.

What was wrong with it

Nothing, which was the problem. It was a correct wine: clean, balanced, the fruit and the tannin in the right proportions, no faults. If you had poured it blind for a critic it would have scored perfectly well. And it tasted of nothing that made it Coldfoot. The iron note from the clay was not there yet. The finish stopped where it should have kept going.

We have released wines like that before. The 2016 went out on schedule and I still meet people who bought a case, opened one bottle in 2017, decided it was boring, and gave the other eleven away. By 2021 it was the best thing we had ever made and none of those people ever knew.

What it cost

Here are the numbers, because nobody in wine publishes them and they are the whole story:

Item	Figure
Bottles held	1,480
Price per bottle	£48
Revenue delayed	£71,040
Months delayed	14
Members who cancelled	3 of 41
Members who wrote to say thank you	11

Seventy-one thousand pounds sitting in the cellar for fourteen months is most of a year’s margin for an estate our size. We covered it by selling the 2024 Quarry Road Gamay three months earlier than planned, which is exactly what Gamay is for.

What changed

We tasted it again in February, and again in April. The April bottle had the iron. It had the long, dry, slightly smoky finish, and in the glass it kept changing for an hour after opening, which is the thing we look for in Coldfoot and do not find in anything else we make.

It is still young. We would not open one before 2027. But it is now the wine it was always going to be, and the only thing we did to get it there was nothing, for fourteen months.

The rule

We had an informal version of this before. It is now written down, and it is the third of the five rules on the estate page: nothing is released until it is ready, whatever the price list says.