Region: Marlborough, New Zealand

Varietal: 100% Pinot Noir

Producer: The Bourgeois family has been making wine in Sancerre for ten generations — long enough to have an opinion about soil. So when Rémi and Jean-Marie Bourgeois came to Marlborough in the late 1990s looking for land, they weren't browsing casually. They were looking for something specific: soils with the same geological complexity and mineral character that makes their native Loire Valley so compelling. They found it in the Wairau Valley, where ancient glacial and tectonic forces have deposited a patchwork of soil types unlike anywhere else in New Zealand. The estate was established in 2000, named Clos Henri in honour of their father, and has been certified organic since 2013. Today the domaine is run by brothers Arnaud, Lionel, and Jean-Christophe Bourgeois — the next generation carrying the same obsession with terroir across two hemispheres.

Vineyard & Winemaking: The Waimaunga single vineyard takes its name directly from the Waimaungan Glaciation period — the ancient geological event responsible for depositing the deep windblown clays on which these vines grow. The estate sits at the convergence of two distinct geological ages, split by the Wairau Fault Line, and the Waimaunga clay soils — both Broadbridge and Wither clay — produce wines of an entirely different character to the estate's glacial stone-grown fruit: more intense, textural, and generous. Winemaker Damien Yvon hand-picks all fruit, wild ferments the must with 20% whole bunches in large French oak with no crushing, keeps extraction deliberately light with less than three weeks of post-ferment maceration, and ages the wine for 12 months in French oak — 20% new. The result is Pinot Noir built on restraint, not force.

Tasting Notes: The 2022 opens with a complex, layered bouquet of dark plum, boysenberry, and blueberry with baking spice, floral lift, and a thread of wild herbs and soil smoke underneath. On the palate it is full-bodied but refined — chiseled and linear, with chalk-dust tannins framing supple dark fruit through a long, silky finish with real persistence. This is Marlborough Pinot Noir as the Bourgeois family always intended it: precise, terroir-driven, and built to age. Sancerre sensibility, Southern Hemisphere soul.