Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc… “unexpected flavours of gooseberries, passion-fruit and lime, or crunchy green asparagus spears… an entirely new, brilliantly successful, wine style that the rest of the world has been attempting to copy ever since…”
Oz Clarke describes what wine lovers from around the world come to discover first-hand at Marlborough’s wineries.
Marlborough wine is much more than Sauvignon Blanc. You’ll discover superb aromatics like Riesling, Gewürztraminer, Pinot Gris; a regional, elegant Chardonnay style, fine Methode Traditionelle, and award winning Pinot Noir, some in limited quantities available only at cellar door.
Tour and taste at more than 55 wineries, compare the characteristics of boutique-style wines and see first hand the soil and vines which gave birth to these extraordinary flavours. Marlborough wines frequently dominate the gold medals in wine shows nationally and around the world more on Wine Awards.
Individual micro-climates nurture localised characteristics, within the vineyard-studded Wairau Plain, in the neighbouring Awatere Valley, north towards Picton and south in Kaikoura.
Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc – why is it distinctive?
The great English wine writer Oz Clarke sums up Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc in his Wine Atlas as:
“But then, no wine anywhere in the world had tasted like them. No previous wine had shocked, thrilled, offended, entranced the world before with such brash, unexpected flavours of gooseberries, passion-fruit and lime, or crunchy green asparagus spears… - an entirely new, brilliantly successful, wine style that the rest of the world has been attempting to copy ever since”.
The Sauvignons of Marlborough have continued to evolve so there is now a range of styles across the region, but that underlying fruit character remains throughout.
There are a number of reasons which may explain why our Marlborough wines are distinctive: free-draining soils, high sunshine hours, cool nights, and moderate rainfall throughout the year. However, the key seems to be the combination of a low average maximum temperature in summer and a very long period of effective ripening. This allows the grapes to ripen fully while still retaining fruit characters that are lost at higher summer temperatures in some other sauvignon producing areas of the world.
That’s what makes us different!