Saint Clair Wairau Reserve Sauvignon Blanc 2025
£19.75
The wine
An intensely fragrant wine where aromas of tropical blackcurrant bud and passion fruit are complemented by delicate notes of green nettle. Rich and beautifully balanced, with vibrant flavours of passion fruit and melon and an underlying mineral note leading to a long, saline finish.
Wairau Reserve comes from the valley that gave Marlborough its reputation, the broad river plain of free-draining stony soils running inland from Cloudy Bay. It is warmer than the Awatere to the south, and gives the ripe passion fruit and melon character most people picture when they think of the region. The Reserve tier sits above Origin and below the single blocks.
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.
