The Wine Advocate | RP 96
Published: Dec 14, 2023

The 2021 Burn Cottage Vineyard Pinot Noir is alive and energetic, svelte and composed. As I write this, I am sitting at the bottom of the Burn Cottage Vineyard in Lowburn, looking up the rows. This is a mineral, nuanced expression, with graphite and white tea, pomegranate pearls, raspberry licorice, rosehips and crushed pink peppercorns. This is what I came here for. It’s thrilling, lacy, delicate and focused. Exciting wine, exciting drinking. It sits on the palate nicely—evenly weighted, and it spools through the long finish... yes! 13.5% alcohol, sealed under natural cork.
Drink Date: 2023 - 2036

Jamessuckling.com | JS 94
Published: Oct 25, 2023

Baked strawberries, pomelo zest and potpourri with underlying sweet spices of red licorice and ground cloves. Medium-bodied, finely-grained silky tannins with refreshing acidity. A hint of tomato leaf notes at the end. Zesty and flavorsome. From organically grown grapes. Drink or hold.

Burncottage.com

At Burn Cottage we believe in minimal intervention winemaking. Our task is to discover the genius of the site and of the individual vineyard blocks within and to allow the wines to reveal it. 

We believe in minimizing sulphur usage and avoiding all additives whenever possible. We avoid the use of cultured yeasts, bacteria, associated nutrient products and filters. We avoid racking whenever possible and do wine work according to lunar and celestial rhythms.

Our grapes are handpicked and then brought to our winery, where we sort through the individual bunches, of which a portion is kept whole with the stalks intact. The balance is then destemmed and the individual berries cross over a second sorting table for inspection by the winery team.

Each block within the respective vineyards is fermented separately in a combination of open top wooden and stainless steel fermenters. The indigenous ferments are nurtured for 17-22 days and given a combination of gentle pump overs and plunge downs before being pressed off and transferred to French barrels. We prefer oak to be a partner and support the wine but not to show overtly, and so we only use 20-30% new oak.

After around 11 months in barrel we then taste, evaluate and select the parcels of wine that will be bottled, unfined and unfiltered as Burn Cottage Vineyard, Moonlight Race and Valli Vineyard. Our wine talks of place, climate, geology and most importantly of the people that make the dream possible.

Label artwork:
The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily is a fairy tale by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published in 1795 in Friedrich Schiller's German magazine Die Horen (The Hours). It portrays, in imaginative form, Goethe's impressions of Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. The story revolves around the crossing and bridging of a river, which represents the divide between the outer life of the senses and the ideal aspirations of the human being.

This is a story about the combining the 'ideal human being' in everyone with 'outer life experiences', the two working in harmony. If this can be achieved then the human will become complete and fulfill his destiny. This was an inspirational story for Steiner and informs his life's work, including Bio-dynamics. The practice of Bio-dynamics can be seen as an undertaking of the "ideal human being" working towards a better way with long term solutions to existing problems. Bio-dynamics is a practice of the 'ideal human' as this approach is in contrast to the short term economic gain approach of chemical fertilization.