Te Mata Bullnose Syrah

Te Mata Bullnose Syrah is a barrel-aged red wine made by the Te Mata Estate winery with the Syrah variety in the Hawke Valley (New Zealand).

Founded in 1896, Te Mata Estate is one of the three oldest wineries in New Zealand. It was established when an English family discovered the winemaking potential of the Hawke Valley. That is when they started growing vines. Currently, Te Mata owns about 150 hectares of vineyards, only about 30% of which are used to make their own wines. This involves careful selection of the best plots to produce top quality wines.

Te Mata Bullnose Syrah is a single-variety wine made only with the Syrah variety from the winery’s best vineyards in Hawke’s Bay. These are plots cultivated using traditional and sustainable agriculture with the harvest carried out manually when the grapes reach optimum ripeness.

In the winery, each plot is destemmed separately and undergoes fermentation and prolonged maceration at a controlled temperature. Te Mata Bullnose Syrah is then pressed and the resulting wine ages in a mixture of new and used French oak barrels over 15 months with regular pump overs. Finally it is mixed, clarified with egg whites and bottled ready for sale.

The name of this wine, Te Mata Bullnose Syrah, is a tribute to a Morris Cowley car nicknamed Bullnose because of its large radiator. A metaphor that shows the power, concentration and intensity of this wine.