Saint Clair Origin Viognier 2021
£13.45
The wine
An elegant wine displaying prominent notes of white peach, nectarine and fragrant almond blossom laced with impressions of spice. Rich and creamy on the palate with flavours of apricot kernel and ripe green apple with savoury characters, silky and round with a subtle spice note on the finish.
Viognier is grown in Hawke's Bay rather than Marlborough, on the warmer east coast of the North Island, because the variety needs real heat to develop its apricot and blossom character and turns thin and green without it. It is a difficult grape: pick early and it tastes of nothing, pick late and the alcohol runs away. The Origin range is Saint Clair's regional tier.
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.
