WineNZ Summer 18-19 (1)

sauvignon blanc | tastings
Professor Xue Yang struts her stuff.
Top sauvvies
Words by Paul Taggart
The New Zealand sauvignon blanc industry has divided
into four strands in recent years.
The first produces heavily
cropped, bulk exported
wine mainly for overseas
supermarkets, the second
generally makes better
quality wine, which is
bottled in New Zealand, the third produces
aged premium wine. Finally we have
sauvignon blanc produced in places other
than Marlborough.
Although this tasting is open to allcomers,
thankfully the producers from
the first category rarely enter. They may
be too busy filling their bladders, making
up fantasy Kiwi winery names to put on
their labels or diluting their Marlborough
wine with juice from elsewhere in a bid
to hit UK supermarkets’ low price points.
They also generally bottle off-shore and
their products don’t make it back to
New Zealand.
The second group contains the bottles
most wine people care about – produced by
small and medium businesses which take
an interest in cropping levels, sub-regions,
their reputations and their customers. These
are the wineries the Marlborough industry
was built around before it was hijacked by
overseas-owned mega companies.
Number three – the producers of premium
wines – is a tiny segment, and we’ll come
back to them at the end of this tasting, as
they deserve a sub-section of their own.
This group may – or may not – provide a
future direction for some in the industry.
Finally – the non-Marlborough wines.
Having staged quite a few sauvignon blanc
tastings for this magazine, it is fairly clear
to me that some Nelson wines can compete
well against their neighbours – with a
couple of Nelsonians again up among the
Marlborough elite in this tasting.
However, while we have had entrants from
regions further away from Marlborough
than Nelson – namely Hawke’s Bay,
Waipara and Central Otago, they rarely
make it on to the podium. It is not that
they’re bad wines, just that they haven’t
been sprinkled with the Marborough pixie
dust. No pixie dust, no gold medals.
So the first section of this series of
tastings is the important one – probably
our most important tasting of the year.
The classification is sauvignon blancs
from 2018 – a year where producers had
a few weather issues, but not enough for
it to have a major impact on quality. We
ended up with three five-star wines. The
three businesses cocerned are all big and
successful wineries, but are also all still
family concerns.
Top of the heap was Marisco, which is
consistently among the leaders in these
events, but this time came out of the taste
off with the other two five-star wines as
a clear winner. I great effort from one of
our most consistent high-quality wineries.
www.winenzmagazine.co.nz
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