The best Sauvignon Blancs from the 2017 Global Masters

What the judges thought: Jonathan Pedley MW

“From a quality and style point of view the line-up was a real mixed bag. A significant proportion of the wines were correct but unexciting: failing to win a medal or just scraping a bronze. Faults aside, reaching first base with Sauvignon Blanc (clean as a whistle, up front varietal fruit, vibrant acidity) is relatively straightforward.  However, moving on to something finer and more complex remains a big challenge. The techniques are known (riper fruit, blending with Semillon, oak ageing, lees work) but are hard to get right in the context of Sauvignon Blanc. Château Brown 2016 achieved it beautifully, but few others came close.

New Zealand, and Marlborough in particular, remained pre-eminent in delivering a good Sauvignon Blanc across the price spectrum. There were also good examples from South Africa, Australia, France (Loire and Bordeaux) and most surprisingly, Turkey (our antepenultimate wine “Quartz”).

I am afraid that there were a large number of mediocre wines from Chile (over cropped? wrong clones? wrong climate in some areas?). Some of the warmer climate Sauvignon Blancs (Israel, South Africa, California and Australia) did give the impression that their finer aromatics had been ‘burnt off’.

The use of oak on the “Fumé Blanc” style wines was definitely done better than in the past. I think that winemakers have come to realise that for the vanilla oak notes to integrate into the wine the Sauvignon Blanc fruit has to be riper and richer.

In other words getting the oak to marry with yellow plum and green melon aromas (the riper end of the spectrum) is much better than trying to make the wood work with herbaceous and cooking apple aromas (the greener end of the spectrum).”