2014 Greywacke Sauvignon Blanc
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Tasting notes
Bright, pale lemon-yellow. Musky aromas of lemon drop, peach, fresh herbs and pepper. Sweet and supple, conveying excellent intensity and lift to its peach and orange zest flavors, with some bound-up CO2 keeping it fresh. A bit less generous and more youthfully compressed than the 2015 version, with a peppery element that still needs to harmonize with the wine's fruit, but boasts terrific sappy intensity and length.
Critic scores
Average Score
Lisa Perrotti-Brown MW, Wine Advocate
Stephen Tanzer, Vinous
More reviews and scores
The 2014 Sauvignon Blanc exudes a slightly yeasty / savory fruit nose with plenty of lemon and lime character presiding over nuances of lightly browned toast, white blossoms and coriander seed. There's also some coriander coming through on the elegantly fruited palate that also has a nice suggestion of minerals on the long finish.
Very typical. Too sweet! (JR)
The 2014 Sauvignon Blanc exudes a slightly yeasty / savory fruit nose with plenty of lemon and lime character presiding over nuances of lightly browned toast, white blossoms and coriander seed. There's also some coriander coming through on the elegantly fruited palate that also has a nice suggestion of minerals on the long finish.<br><br>I met-up with legendary Marlborough winemaker and very talented photographer Kevin Judd in Central Otago this trip. Along with the new releases, he presented me with a vertical tasting of The “Wild Sauvignon Blanc” to demonstrate how it ages. Kevin Judd (who, I should probably point out, was one of the founders and the former winemaker at Cloudy Bay), was emphatically not looking to reinvent Cloudy Bay's Te Koko with this wine. And although it too is a barrel fermented style, this is where the similarities end. Produced from a sub-set of the batches that go into his straight Sauvignon Blanc label, for this wine he is looking for a riper cross section of batches with slightly higher alcohol. So ten different batches usually compose the wine. The real difference between these two styles is in the fermentations. With the Wild, it is wild, i.e. all natural fermentation and malo-lactic. He begins with clear juice so as not to produce too much of that (currently trendy) sulfide character. Fermented in oak - 7% new, Mercury French oak, lightly toasted - the wine is unsulfured until it comes out of barrel. 2/3 -3/4 of the barrels go through malo-lactic. It is then transferred to tank and stirred on lees in the tank. In contrast to Te Koko, which is in some ways more about the winemaking, with this wine Judd told me he wanted to show more of the Sauvignon Blanc fruit, and and is ultimately looking to forge a fresher, more varietally expressive style. Dec 2014, www.robertparker.com, Drink: 2014-2018