Saint Clair Origin Sauvignon Blanc 2025
£13.45
The wine
Intense tropical aromas of passion fruit, grapefruit and green apple with a hint of jalapeno pepper lead to a rich and weighty palate, with flavours of white stone fruit, grapefruit pith and blackcurrant and a salty, mineral finish.
The Origin range sits between Tuatara Bay and the single-block wines, drawn from across Saint Clair's Marlborough holdings rather than from one site. Blending the warmer Wairau valley floor with the cooler, more herbal Awatere gives a Sauvignon with both tropical weight and green cut, which is why it reads as a fuller style than most.
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.
