Graham Beck Pheasants’ Run Sauvignon Blanc 2007

I buy far too much wine, and lacking a decent place in my house to keep it properly cellared, I have a climate controlled storage unit where most of it ends up.  That’s a good thing for at least two reasons, in that first the wine is kept in good condition and second when I visit to dig out a bottle, it’s often a pleasant surprise when I come across something long forgotten.  The downside is that since I don’t have a proper inventory (yet), some things can sit too long and I don’t find them until they’re past their prime.  I was pleasantly surprised both to find this bottle hiding away, and that it was not the case that it had sat for too long.  And so the wine for today is a five year old bottle of Graham Beck Pheasants’ Run Sauvignon Blanc 2007.

It took me a while in this blog to get to a Sauvignon Blanc, and when I did, I went with a Saint-Bris which was a bit of a rarity.  Since then I’ve written about a few others, including the recent Bannockburn creation.  It’s not that I don’t enjoy the grape, but rather that it’s been so ubiquitous since I started studying wine that I largely ignored it, instead preferring the more obscure grapes.  I’ve helped make two styles of Sauvignon Blanc in the Adelaide Hills, one in the classic modern style of fresh fruit fermented in stainless steel and bottled almost immediately, and another fermented in oak and matured somewhat before bottling.  The former is for drinking immediately, the latter improves with time.  Between expanding my horizons by tasting Sauvignon Blanc from around the world, and being involved in its production, I’ve deepened my appreciation of the grape, and look forward to having some more when the weather warms up a bit.  (It’s the middle of a cold, wet winter here.)  For details about the grape itself, have a look at the Astrolabe write-up from last month.

As regular readers will know, I often lament the availability of other New World wines here in Australia.  The reason I had this five year old bottle of wine from South Africa in my cellar  is that I had it shipped here after a trip to the Cape, when I had the pleasure of visiting the Graham Beck facilities in Franschhoek (now relocated to Robertson).  It was an impressive set-up, from the very fancy cellar door through to the ultra-modern bottling line, visible through a large window from the bar.

The company was founded eponymously by self-made billionaire Graham Beck in 1983, much of it funded through his success as a businessman in the mining industry.  The first vintage was in 1991, and though Beck passed away in 2010, his company continues from strength to strength.  It is a leader in the production of Cap Classique (a uniquely South African sparkling wine), with the Brut NV having been the drink of choice for the inauguration of President Nelson Mandela in 1994.  In addition to over a half dozen different sparklers, the company produces two dozen still wines, reds, whites and rosés, varietals and blends, table and sweet.  They have plantings (or access to fruit) of Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Chenin Blanc, Viognier, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz, Pinotage, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Sangiovese, Ruby Cabernet, Mourvedre, Malbec, and Muscat de Frontignan.

Since I’ve had a few Sauvignon Blancs recently, just a quick note about how this was made (or at least how more recent vintages have been made – I can’t find a 2007 technical note).  Pheasants’ Run is made with skin contact, though it only 18 hours worth.  It is fermented slowly at low temperatures, which suggest refrigerated steel instead of barrels, though no specific mention of the vessel is given.  Post fermentation there is some amount of time on lees, on the order of five to six months, with stirring shortly before bottling.  So it’s somewhere between the non-interventionist style of Astrolabe and the every trick in the book approach of Bannockburn.

As I mentioned, when I visited their cellar door was in Franschhoek, which I described at least briefly when I wrote about Haute Cabrière.  Strictly speaking, this is a wine of Coastal Region, which includes not only Franschhoek (strictly speaking, the Paarl region) but also Constantia, Durbanville, Cape Point, Swartland, and Tulbagh.

In the glass this wine is clear and bright, with a pale lemon green colour and some legs.  On the nose it’s clean and still developing, with medium plus intensity and notes of green bell pepper, peas, asparagus, and lemon.  It started with a bit of that yoghurt culture/mushroom note that I sometimes get, but as I’ve not been able to convince anyone else that I can actually smell such an aroma, I should either find a more commonly accepted descriptor or just stop mentioning it altogether.  On the palate it’s dry, with medium plus acidity, medium body, medium plus intensity, and medium plus alcohol.  It has notes of lemon, green pea, bell pepper, and a bit of cream.  It is fairly rich, and opened up extremely well with a hint of bacon.  It has medium length with a bell pepper and white pepper finish.

I’m happy giving this wine a very good rating.  It has a complex range of flavours, strong intensity and concentration on the nose and palate, and it’s developed very nicely.  Unless it’s a very special bottle that you know will mature with time, I do not generally recommend cellaring Sauvignon Blanc for five years, but this bottle managed the task handily.  The next bottle I encounter I hope to have a bit younger to compare and contrast.

Domaine Roger Champault Sancerre Le Clos du Roy 2008

Learning about wine has been (and continues to be) an interesting journey.  I think I developed my initial tastes in wine based on what people I knew were drinking, so I can remember exactly who introduced me to oaky, buttery California Chardonnay, white Burgundy, and Sancerre.  (All women I fancied, funnily enough.)  It would be years later that I came to understand anything about those respective wine, such that white Burgundy is also Chardonnay.  I remember a real revelation though when I encountered a bottle of red wine that had Sancerre on the label, and my mind was opened up to the fact it’s a region, not a grape.  And with that memory in mind, today it’s a bottle of the more familiar colour from there, the Domaine Roger Champault Sancerre Le Clos du Roy 2008.

So yes, Sancerre is a region.  I have personally verified that with a visit last July, and it’s well worth the trip.  At the far eastern end of the Loire Valley, it’s arguably the best known of its subregions.  The region stretches out to the north, west and south around the walled town of Sancerre itself, which sits atop a hill overlooking the surrounding area.  To the east is the river, and across it is Pouilly-Fumé.  The climate is continental, though slightly mitigated by the river, and the hillsides can provide favourable aspects.  The soils are generally grouped into three classifications – the vineyard to the west are situated on clays and limestone, those near the town are on flinty soils, and in between is gravel and limestone.

As I alluded to earlier, Sancerre as a region produces more than just white wine – it covers the spectrum with reds and rosés as well.  White wines, which constitute the vast majority of production, are varietal Sauvignon Blanc, while reds and rosés are made from Pinot Noir.

Most of my experience with Sancerre (in terms of drinking it) is in the context of eating shellfish.  For me, there is something about facing a heap of crustaceans and bivalves atop a pile of crushed ice that makes me thirst for white Sancerre.  This is strange for a few reasons.  First, while many of the white wines from Sancerre have a flinty, minerally character that goes very well with the aforementioned heap of tastiness, some of the Sauvignon Blancs of Sancerre see oak treatment, which makes the pairing less obvious.  Second, of all of the regions in the Loire, Sancerre is nearly the most distant from the sea, meaning any salt-water shellfish would be on a truck for hours before making it to a plate in Sancerre.  And finally, the only time I actually had a picture postcard plateau de fruits de mer in France was in Nantes at La Cigale, at the opposite end of the Loire Valley and of course when in Nantes, one drinks Muscadet Sevre-et-Maine.  (It was a wonderful meal, complete with a table full of locals who were happy to act as grandparents to my then eight month old daughter while my wife and I ate.)

I have in fact written up a Sauvignon Blanc recently, the Astrolabe, and I did talk a bit about the variety so I won’t repeat myself so quickly.  However, as varietal Sauvignon Blancs from Marlborough and Sancerre are often held up as examples of how a grape can be very different depending on the terroir and the treatment, it’s worth having a quick compare and contrast, though in general terms, not of these wines specifically.  For white wines of Sancerre, Jancis Robinson uses terms like racy, pungent, delicate, and perfumed.  While not exactly austere, fruit is not the main thrust of the wine.  Rather, people claim to be able to taste the limestone of the soil.  Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, on the other hand, can have much more evident fruit, with gooseberry, grass, bell pepper and cat piss being more common descriptors.  Of course these are very broad strokes, and there are certainly winemakers in Marlborough expressing the terroir through their wines as there are those in France who strive to ride on the success of Marlborough with greater expression of fruit in their wines.

This producer was founded (at least in its current form) by the namesake, Roger Champault, though he was the fifth generation to work in the family business of growing vines and more recently producing wine in the Sancerre region.  Now succeeded by his two sons, Laurent and Claude, who in turn are assisted by three workers, production is based on roughly 20 HAs of their estate.  They produce nine wines – four each whites and reds, with a rosé rounding out the mix.  This wine is made from vines based on limestone soil, and after fermentation spends some time on fine lees.  I can’t tell from research if that time is spent in tank or barrel, but my notes suggest barrel.

In the glass this wine is clear and bright, pale gold with quick legs, with a fully developed character and medium plus intensity.  It started out with a bit of yoghurt on the nose, which opened up into oak and mineral notes. On the palate it has notes of lemon, mineral, and more oak.  It’s dry, with medium plus acid, medium plus flavour intensity, medium body, medium alcohol, medium plus length, and an oak finish.  It has a very nice texture.

This is certainly a good wine in that it’s of good quality and well made, but unfortunately I’m drinking it a bit past it’s prime.  As I was tasting it, if I had to guess the variety I would have started thinking it was Sauvignon Blanc but as it opened up it turned into a Chardonnay.  I’m not sure which I liked more.  While I certainly enjoy wines with a bit of age on them, and I don’t shy away from older whites, I’m fairly certain this was better a year or two ago and I wish I had been able to enjoy it then.  So a bit of a shame to be drinking it when I was, but I wouldn’t hesitate to try a younger version in the future.

Astrolabe Province Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc 2011

If all you knew about New Zealand came from this blog, first off I would tell you that you need to do a bit more outside reading.  But second, I would apologize to you because my coverage of my neighbours across the Tasman has been pretty scant, and so far limited to two wines, both from Central Otago.  Today I’m going to try to improve on that slightly, and for a change I’m not going for anything unusual or obscure.  Instead I’m going for something of a benchmark, the Astrolabe Province Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc 2011.

Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc is considered a classic by some, a cliché by others, but it’s indisputably one of if the best known wines of the New World.  It is the wine that put New Zealand on the map, and love it or hate it, it’s not only widely enjoyed but increasingly emulated.

New Zealand has been making wine for almost 200 years, but it is only in the last 40 years that it has produced high quality wine for export.  Vines were first planted in Marlborough only as recently as 1973, but it was in 1985 that Cloudy Bay brought the region and the country to the international stage with their Sauvignon Blanc, and now New Zealand has more Sauvignon Blanc planted than the Loire or Bordeaux, and many time more than Australia.  The more fruit-forward style, combined with gooseberries, bell peppers, and to some palates, cat piss, took the world by storm and advanced New Zealand’s brand as a clean, pristine land producing excellent wines.

Of course wine is a fashion driven industry.  As far as fashion, the world continues to consume no end of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, but as a successful industry it has continued to grow and the premium it once commanded for brand New Zealand has been somewhat undermined by the huge increase in supply.  While the wines of New Zealand can still command a premium, it’s not what it once was, and the minimum price you can pay for a bottle continues to drop.

However, I think it’s fair to put most of those concerns behind us for now as we look at Astrolabe, unquestionably one of the premium producers of Marlborough.  Established in 1996 by a group of four friends, the name Astrolabe refers both to the ship of a 19th century French explorer who sailed through the Marlborough Sounds and to the navigational instrument for which it was named.  The A motif on their label is a stylized representation of an actual astrolabe.  Tragically, in October 2011 the company had 4000 cases of wine destined for Ireland on a container ship that was grounded on a reef that shares the company name.

They produce three main types of wines – Province based on regionality of Marlborough in general, Valleys based on subregions within Marlborough, and Vineyards based on single vineyards.  (Until recently, the names for those ranges were Voyage, Discovery and Experience respectively.)  While the majority of their wine is Sauvignon Blanc, they also produce Sauvignon Gris, Riesling, Chardonnay, Gewürztraminer, Pinot Gris, and Pinot Noir.  Their market is exclusively at the top end, meaning restaurant and fine wine trade.

Marlborough itself is worth a word in addition to its place in bringing New Zealand to the forefront with Sauvignon Blanc.  Located at the north end of the South Island around Blenheim, Montana was the company who made a huge investment (and thus took a huge risk) and first planted vines in 1973.  The area is a flat river valley with alluvial soils of silt and water smoothed stones. The climate is maritime, with dry summers and sometimes frosty winters.  Irrigation is a must throughout most of the region.  The explosion of wine production in the region was accompanied by a growth market in contract winemaking which encouraged many growers with no experience in winemaking to produce their own label wines.  Raupara Vintners (once Vin Tech) is described as “the closest thing that New Zealand has to a co-operative winery.”  While Sauvignon Blanc reigns supreme, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir fight for distant second and third, and are sometimes both used in the production of sparkling wine.

So that’s the producer and region, which means I’m home and dry since I certainly have discussed the grape, Sauvignon Blanc, before.  Except that I haven’t.  This is not my first Sauvignon Blanc varietal in this blog, but the other one was a Saint-Bris, and the novelty of that overwhelmed my ability to stick to format.  Therefore, on to the grape itself.

Sauvignon Blanc is a classic white grape, traditionally associated with both Bordeaux where it is typically found blended with Semillon for both dry and sweet wines, and the Loire where it is more commonly a dry varietal wine.  It buds late but ripens early.  Its character is determined to a large extent by climate, with high acidity and crisp flavours being pronounced in cooler climates, but with lower acidity and more tropical fruit characters being evident under warmer conditions.  While likely French in origin, it has certainly emerged as an international variety, with plantings not only in Italy, Spain and parts of Eastern Europe, but especially throughout the New World, with California, Chile, South Africa, and Australia joining New Zealand.

In the glass, this wine is clear and bright, with pale lemon green colour and legs when swirled.  On the nose it’s clean, youthful, with medium plus intensity, and notes of green pea, asparagus, lemon-lime, and green pepper (capsicum).  On the palate it’s dry, with medium plus acidity, medium body, medium plus alcohol, medium plus flavour intensity, and notes of green pepper, lemon, sweet pea, and asparagus.  It has a medium plus length and a clean finish.

This is a very good quality wine.  It has some elements of complexity, particularly for such a young wine, but not a huge amount.  What it does have though is intensity.  It’s also well balanced, in that it’s fairly full on throughout.  It’s also strong on typicity – you would not mistake this wine for another variety, nor would you think it was from any other part of the world.

Pin in the map is Blenheim – their office address is a post office box there and that’s the closest I can get for now.

Goisot Saint-Bris 2007

Sometimes I write up wines because the grape, region or producer particularly interests me.  In this case though, it’s a wine that is made to mess with people who think they know about wine.  The wine for today is a classic Sauvignon Blanc from Burgundy, the Goisot Saint-Bris 2007.

Now if you know little or nothing about wine, the words Sauvignon Blanc and Burgundy might all seem fine in a sentence because one is a grape, one is a region, and what’s not to like.  However, when you know slightly more than a little, you’ll believe that white Burgundy means Chardonnay.  Then, just when you think you know what you’re talking about you’ll be able to meaningfully drop Aligoté as a charming, lesser known, Burgundian white grape.  It’s at that point someone will pour you a glass of Saint-Bris, tell you only it’s from Burgundy, and watch you try to decide if it’s Chardonnay or Aligoté.

Honestly though, I love that there is always something to learn about wine – there’s always some obscure region that is worth exploring or a new producer doing something interesting that’s worth trying.  And along the same line, there’s no point in thinking you know very much about wine, because there’s no shortage of things that are unknown, new, or both.

But really, there isn’t much that’s unusual about this wine except to people who think they know more than they do.  Saint-Bris is a region of Burgundy just south of Chablis, which puts it closer to Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé than to Côte des Beaune.  So really, instead of asking why Sauvignon Blanc is planted in Saint-Bris, one could just as readily ask why Chardonnay is planted in Chablis?  Fortunately, that’s not actually a question I want to try to answer here, because I’m actually quite fond of Chablis as it is, and as this is my first Saint-Bris Sauvignon Blanc, I’m liking it even before my first sip.

To actually address Saint-Bris as more than a curiosity, it is a proper AOC, since 2001 that is, for white wine within Burgundy, best known as the only Sauvignon Blanc AOC, though Sauvignon Gris is also permitted even if rarely present.  Before the formalization of the AOC system, it was sometimes sold as Chablis, and pre-phylloxera it hosted another white grape, Roublot, though it was largely replanted with Sauvignon Blanc.  The climate is cool continental with frost an annual danger, and the soil is not so different from its northern neighbour, Chablis, with clay and limestone.

Sauvignon Blanc is generally worth a few pages, and this is actually the first varietal I’ve had since I started this blog, but I can’t bring myself to first write it as a grape in the context of Saint-Bris when there are so many other regions more readily identified with the grape.  I will instead put the discussion of Sauvignon Blanc as a grape on hold until I have a Sancerre or a Marlborough offering in hand, and as the summer is fading here, it will need to be sooner rather than later.

Domain Goisot is a family with over six centuries of history Saint-Bris, which has itself been home to vines for nearly 2,000 years.  They’re located in Saint-Bris itself, though they produce wines of a few local appellations, including other Sauvignon Blancs and a Pinot Noir.

The first thing I noticed about this wine in the glass is that it was slightly oxidized.  It was a medium minus gold colour, with a quick film upon swirling.  On the nose was bruised apple, almond, lemon/lime, and a vegetal aroma like a freshly cut open squash or pumpkin.  On the palate there was high tart acidity, with notes of lemon, mineral, and more of the vegetal flavour.  It had a medium plus length, a medium minus body, a medium plus intensity, and a medium length with a tinned asparagus finish.

I bought this wine as a bin end, and while I’ve certainly enjoyed learning about the region and producer, I had some concern this bottle was not in ideal condition.  Being five years old and a varietal not typically known for having huge ageing potential, I knew I was taking a chance, and when it showed notes suggesting it was oxidized, I initially thought it was past its prime, but having looked more closely at the Goisot website, I’m not so sure.

I’m honestly not sure I would have guessed Sauvignon Blanc had I been poured this blind, though the vegetal character, especially the asparagus should have given that away.  I’ve read that Saint-Bris produces Sauvignon Blanc but with Chablis technical treatment.  I’m not actually sure I know what that means, but given that this one has gone through malolactic fermentation, and has spent time on lees, it could mean that there’s a fair amount of winemaking employed on it.    And with that in mind, I’m calling this a good wine, though one I would like to try again in a younger form (the wine, not me).

Having skipped key parts of what I try to keep as my standard post format, I’m feeling slightly guilty that the whose raison d’être of this post is to point out that there’s an appellation in Burgundy based around Sauvignon Blanc.  While that was incredibly novel to me when I first found that out (a few days ago), it’s not a great insight – it’s a bit of trivia you either know or you don’t.  I do enjoy such tidbits, but in the future I’ll try to keep them as asides or footnotes instead of devoting an entire post to one.