Sauvignon Blanc

A French grape that sounds different in New Zealand

Sauvignon blanc is a grape variety, not a region. The name means something like “wild white,” and the grape originally comes from France: the Loire Valley and Bordeaux. It is now one of the most popular grape varieties in the world, and is also grown in New Zealand, Chile, South Africa and the United States. In the glass, the wine is usually pale in color, light yellow with a hint of green. When the grape is blended with sémillon in Bordeaux, the wine becomes a more intense yellow. Wherever the bottle comes from, it is almost always a dry, refreshingly crisp wine with high acidity.

The origin matters so much because of two very different places. Sauvignon blancs from the Loire are light and elegant in flavor, while a sauvignon blanc from New Zealand has the same juicy fruit but a much more intense flavor. In Sancerre, a small area of thirty square kilometers in the upper Loire, the soil largely determines what ends up in the glass: white clay with a high limestone content produces wines with more body and oomph, gravelly soil makes for a lighter, more delicate structure, and flint-rich soil gives the wine its characteristic mineral flavor. In Marlborough, at the northernmost tip of the South Island, the climate does the work: cool and sunny with plenty of sunshine, dry summers and cool nights, ideal conditions for preserving freshness and aromas in the grapes.