Saint Clair Pioneer Block 1 Foundation Block Sauvignon Blanc 2024
£17.45
Out of stock
The wine
A powerful and intense wine with an aromatic nose of blackcurrant, passion fruit and a hint of oyster shell. Luscious tropical fruit and crushed herb combine with a mineral purity on this linear and focused Sauvignon Blanc, which finishes on a long, mineral note.
Foundation Block is the original Ibbotson vineyard, the land Neal and Judy planted in 1978, which is why it carries the number one. Sixteen years passed between that planting and the founding of the winery, and the vines are now among the oldest Sauvignon in Marlborough. Age brings smaller berries and greater concentration, which shows in the density here.
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.
