Mari Magno is the new, first-level Pinot Noir label. This year's wine is based on fruit from POCW’s échalas (staked, bush-vine, co-planted) block, topped with fruit from the neighbouring young-vine block. It has had an extra 12 months in bottle because the team wanted to learn what this extra time would bring to a wine from these vines. Now we have the answer: it’s delicious! Expect a bright, juicy wine with layers of sweet fruit and plenty of aromatic complexity from its extra year in the bottle. In the future, Mari Magno will be a label that will allow the team at POCW to experiment and to declassify young-vine parcels, trial ferments, etc., that don’t make it into the top label but still justify bottling under Place of Changing Winds.
On the name: Mari Magno, or rough seas, comes from a quote by the great Roman philosopher and poet Lucretius in his epic De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). In the opening of the second chapter of this work, Lucretius describes the pleasure that we might derive from witnessing the struggle of others (the example he gives is of someone standing safely on a shoreline, watching a ship being buffeted by the dangerous waves or ‘big seas’). While this sounds an awful lot like the German concept of Schadenfreude, Lucretius stresses that such pleasure isn’t necessarily because we enjoy the suffering of others, but more because we can rejoice at having been spared the same struggle or danger or mishap. These lines and the idea they express are often abridged by the words Mari Magno or Suave, Mari Magno. Here, then, is something suave (charming, agreeable) and delicious that has derived from the great struggle of others. Please enjoy it!
Alcohol: 13.5%. Closure: Diam.