Saint Clair Origin Merlot 2022
£12.95
The wine
A luscious Merlot displaying savoury aromas of olive, cedar and spice, layered with flavours of dark berried fruits and black plum through to a lightly spiced and toasty finish.
Merlot needs more warmth than Marlborough can offer, so this comes from Hawke's Bay on the North Island's east coast, where the Bordeaux varieties have been grown successfully since the nineteenth century. The region's alluvial gravel soils drain hard and stress the vines into ripeness, giving a rounder, more supple red than anything the South Island produces.
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.
