Coldfoot Pinot Noir 2022

Coldfoot is the lowest block we farm, and the name is exactly what it sounds like. Cold air runs downhill at night, and on a still April night it pools in the hollow at the bottom of the estate like water in a bath. In 2021 it took eighty per cent of the crop in a single night. Coldfoot is the reason we now prune it last, and the reason some years there is no Coldfoot at all.

In the years when the frost misses it, it makes the best wine on the estate. Clay has washed down onto the slate over a few thousand years and the vines here have something to hold on to. The Pinot comes in with a depth the upper blocks never get.

Fourteen months late

The 2022 was meant to be released in spring 2025. We tasted it in January, and it was fine — correct, balanced, very obviously a good wine that had nothing to say yet. So we did not release it. That decision cost us a year of cash on 1,480 bottles and a lot of explaining to members who had it on order, and we wrote about it at length in the journal.

It came out in May 2026. It is still young.

In the glass

Sour cherry rather than sweet. A blood, iron note that comes from the clay — we see it every year in Coldfoot and nowhere else. Dried rose petals, and on the finish a thread of woodsmoke that has nothing to do with the barrels, since only one of the five was new.

It is a quiet wine. It will not win a blind line-up against a bigger Pinot, and we have stopped entering it in anything where it might have to.