While Australian wine drinkers (the common or garden variety you find in the discount section at the liquor barn) would associate Sauvignon Blanc with New Zealand the variety is an important ingredient of white Bordeaux, Sancerre and Pouilly, and complex dessert wines in Sauternes and Barsac as well as the highly rated Sauvignon Blanc Semillon blends known in Australia as SBS or SSB coming out of the Margaret River. There’s more to Sauvignon Blanc than meets the New Zealand in a glass grassy cat’s piss eye thanks to an array of aromatic qualities that vary with location and treatment in the winery.
With naturally high acidity, Sauvignon Blanc is inclined to be tart, a factor that aplies to sweet and dessert styles, keeping them from being cloying and overly sticky. Barrel-fermentation can modify the aroma and add complexity.
Sauvignon Blanc grows in a variety of climates and ripens in a variety of ways to produce significantly different wines. Picked early, you’ll get grassy, capsicum, and asparagus characters. Gooseberry and passionfruit notes emerge when the grapes are a little riper, when fully ripe tropical fruits come to the foreground; and finally, over-ripe with the influence of botrytis, the rich, luscious, honeyed characters you find in Sauternes.
For those reasons, winemakers harvest the grapes at various degrees of ripeness for the varying characters present at different levels of ripeness. Pick early and very unripe, and you’re looking at high levels of malic acid. As they progress towards full ripeness they’ll develop red and green pepper flavours and eventually achieve a balance of sugars. Ferment different parcels separately and blend and you’ll be getting complexity that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.
Probably originating in Bordeaux, and identified as early as the seventeenth century, Sauvignon Blanc probably gets its name from sauvage (wild) and blanc (white). It may be descended from or related to Savagnin or a white mutation of Cabernet Franc. There seems to be a link to the Carmenère family and in the eighteenth century, the vine combined with Cabernet Franc to produce Cabernet Sauvignon. Nineteenth century plantings in Bordeaux were often interspersed with unrelated Sauvignon Vert (Sauvignonasse) and a pink mutation (Sauvignon Gris).
Sauvignon Blanc vines are vigorous, producing small bunches of vivid green-gold berries. The vine is suited to cooler climates, buds late, ripens early and needs a long growing season to give grapes time to develop the balance between acid and sugar that plays a key role in the development of the wine's aromas. The buds late but ripens early means it does well in warm climates as long as it is not too hot, which will deliver over-ripe wines with dull flavours and flat acidity. Rising global temperatures are causing growers to harvest earlier than they have in the past.
As far as the wines are concerned, Sauvignon Blanc tends to fall into one of two dry styles. There’s the fragrant, zingy, crisp, elegant, and fresh (Pouilly Fumé, Sancerre, and Sauvignon de Touraine) Loire Valley style with vegetal, gooseberry flavours of cut-grass, nettles, elderflower, blackcurrant leaf and minerally, zesty, flinty undertones.
Then there’s the Bordeaux-style, often blended with Semillon and Muscadelle and barrel-fermented to to add structure and fruit to the richer, if less assertive, food friendly dry whites. At the same time, it is blended with Semillon in the botrytized sweet whites of Sauternes and Barsac.
In New Zealand, particularly in Marlborough, where sandy soil over slate shingles delivers good drainage but low fertility andt encourages the vine to concentrate flavours the interaction of a cool, maritime climate, intense sunlight, limited rainfall and a long growing season means the grapes develop a natural balance of acids and sugars. As a result the region produces high acid, pungently fruity wines with an array of assertive characters, from green grass, green bean, tinned pea and asparagus to the tropical, ripe spectrum of grapefruit, guava, passionfruit and mango.
In Australia, the best Sauvignon Blanc comes from cool regions, including the Adelaide Hills, the Yarra Valley, and Tasmania, with high acid, a vegetal palate and a grassy, gooseberry nose. The asparagus, gooseberry and green flavours are derived from methoxypyrazines that becomes more pronounced and concentrated in wines from cooler climate regions but are extremely pungent, and can easily become overpowering. It does well in Margaret River but tends to end up in Sauvignon Blanc/Semillon blends. Warmer areas produce a more tropical, herbaceous nose with a broader, fruity, soft palate.
Classic Sauvignon Blanc is vivid on the palate, with aromas of gooseberries, citrus, herbs and cat pee underscored by a crystalline zing of tangy acidity. Oak contact delivers notes of tropical fruit, vanilla, lanolin and toast. Partial malolactic fermentation will add butter and soften the acidity.
Serve Sauvignon Blanc very cold, preferably as a partner for seafood, particularly oysters, selecting a wine from the most recent vintage to maximise freshness and intensity. It is also an ideal aperitif, pairs well with cheese, and is one of the few wines that work well with sushi.
