Saint Clair Barrique Sauvignon Blanc 2021
£17.25
The wine
Complex aromas of green coffee bean, vanilla pod and maple syrup are complemented by notes of wild flowers, crushed herbs and a hint of gunflint. The palate is rich and unctuous, with delicious layers of ripe papaya, nectarine, cocoa powder and toasted hazelnut.
Barrel-fermented Sauvignon Blanc is a deliberate rejection of everything Marlborough is famous for. Fermentation in French oak with wild yeasts, and ageing on the lees, replaces the bright tropical aromatics with something nuttier, smokier and considerably more textural. The style has precedent in Bordeaux, where the best dry whites have always been made this way.
The producer
Saint Clair
View all Saint Clair winesNeal and Judy Ibbotson planted their first vines in Marlborough in 1978, when the region had barely a handful of growers and no reputation whatsoever. For sixteen years they sold their fruit to others. Saint Clair Family Estate was founded in 1994, named after James Sinclair, the pioneer who first drained and farmed the land they had bought.
The estate now owns around 160 hectares across ten separate Marlborough locations, chosen deliberately for how different they are from one another. The Wairau valley floor, the cooler and windier Awatere to the south, and the hillside sites in between all ripen at different rates and give quite different wines from the same grape.
That variation is the point of the Pioneer Block series. Rather than blending everything into one house style, individual parcels are bottled and numbered separately, so Block 1 Foundation, Block 3 43 Degrees and Block 14 Doctor's Creek can be tasted against one another. Few producers anywhere offer so clear a demonstration that Marlborough is not one flavour, and the wines have collected an extraordinary run of trophies doing it.
