2015 Dog Point Vineyard Pinot Noir Marlborough 750 ml

Dog Point’s Cloudy Bay Pedigree

Drawn off 30-year-old vines planted and harvested by two Cloudy Bay alumns, the 2015 Dog Point Pinot Noir is our top value pick of James Suckling’s 2015 New Zealand Pinot Noir Honor Roll. Delivering Old World depth and complexity while sporting a New World price tag. “A pristine model of contained power” is how Robert Parker described the 2015 Dog Point, while Suckling weighed in with an impressive 96 points, hailing this Marlborough standout as a “regal pinot, with soul and swagger.” Just $35 per bottle or $29 each on cases—at half the price of the nearest competition, this is a Pinot Noir bargain-hunter’s day in the sun. Just 276 bottles.

Dog Point is brilliantly run by two of the wiliest, savviest, old-school winemakers on the island, viticulturist Ivan Sutherland and enologist James Healy. The two men first met at Cloudy Bay Vineyards, where, over the course of two decades, they were central in engineering New Zealand’s stunning ascent on the global stage, transforming Cloudy Bay into perhaps the best-known New Zealand winery in the world.

In 2003, the duo broke off and formed the Dog Point label, returning to the vines which Sutherland himself had helped plant over 30 years before. Both men were intimately familiar with the vineyards: They knew the free-draining silty loam of the flats would make for superb Sauvignon Blanc, and that the clay loam of Dog Point’s gentle hillsides, carved thousands of years ago by glaciers, were perfect for the cool-climate Pinot grape. They knew about the area’s abundant light (2,200 hours of sunshine a year), the brisk ocean breezes, and maritime climate, which provide an elongated season and resulting massive ripeness and extraordinary phenolic maturity.

Those conditions, coupled with New Zealand’s abrupt diurnal temperature shifts, help explain the lavish wild-berry concentration and electrifying acid backbone of Dog Point Pinot Noir. And in 2015, a year marked by dryness and low yields, concentration was greater than ever. The result? One of the most extraordinary Kiwi Pinots we’ve seen in some time.