Envoy makes this in Marlborough, at the top of New Zealand's South Island, where Sauvignon Blanc found its loudest voice. The 2016 vintage is now showing the softer side of that voice: the herbal edge has settled, and what is left is rounder and more savoury than the wines from this region tend to be in their first year or two.
- Sauvignon Blanc, Marlborough, New Zealand.
- 2016, a warm, dry Marlborough vintage.
- Light body, high acidity, bone dry.
- 12.5% ABV, 750ml.
How it is made
Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc is picked cool and fermented cool, in stainless steel, to keep the aromatics intact. The region's long, bright days and cold nights slow ripening and build the grape's thiols, the compounds behind the passionfruit and boxwood notes that made this part of New Zealand famous. Nothing here is meant to taste of oak or of time in barrel.
How it tastes
Grapefruit and passionfruit first, then fresh herbs and a flinty, almost stony note underneath. The acidity is high and the body light, so it reads crisp rather than soft. There is a riper, banana-like edge to the aroma that comes with a warmer year, and a melon roundness in the middle that a cooler vintage would not give.
Where it comes from
Marlborough sits at the northeastern tip of the South Island, in the Wairau and Awatere valleys. The soils are mostly gravel and clay over greywacke, free-draining and poor, which stresses the vines into concentrating flavour rather than growing leaf. Sauvignon Blanc was planted here in volume only from the 1970s, and within two decades the region had changed how the world thought about the grape.
Good to know
Marlborough is one of the few wine regions in the world that can be said to have created a style rather than followed one. The combination of high UV, cool nights and dry autumns gives a pungency and intensity that Sauvignon Blanc does not reach anywhere else, including its home in the Loire. A 2016 is a useful thing to find on a list now: the variety's aromatics fade faster than most whites, so a bottle with a few years on it tastes of something different from the current release.
