The Sauvignon Blanc Grape

(Synonyms: Blanc Fumé, Blanc Fumet, Fié Fiers, Fumé, Fumé Blanc, Muskat-Silvaner, MuŠkatani Silvanec, Sauternes, Sauvignon Fumé, Sauvignon Musqué, Sauvignon Blanc Musqué, Savagnou, Sotern Mărunt, Surin, Verdo Belîi)

Background

Sauvignon Blanc is a white-wine grape originating in the Bordeaux and Loire Valley regions of France, where it remains a mainstay type. It is widely considered one of the dozen and a half or so “Noble wine grapes” of the world, and indeed was one of the original three white-wine grapes so designated. It is today grown world-wide, with New World SB wines of note coming from New Zealand (especially), California, Australia, Chile, and Washington State.

Sauvignon Blanc has a strong and distinctive varietal aroma and taste, particularly in New Zealand’s renditions. That quality is variously described as “herbal”, “smoky” (SBs are sometimes called “Fumé blanc”), “grassy”, and sometimes even—and favorably!—“pipi de chat” (cat pee); obviously, the quality is hard to describe—but once encountered is never forgotten.

The taste can be much affected by the climate: in cool climates, the wines tend to be sharply acidic, with the characteristic SB qualities foremost, backed by some notes of fruit and flower; in warm climates, the fruit comes more forward but the defining SB qualities correspondingly recede, tending to leave wines that are mildly pleasant but rather characterless. The best specimens are generally felt to be those from France’s Loire Valley and from New Zealand. In most regions, it is bottled as a monovarietal, but in Bordeaux it is typically blended with Semillon to make regionally named wines.

It is not a wine that benefits much from aging, and indeed will typically deteriorate if not drunk young, though there are exceptions to that rule of thumb (typically those aged on oak before bottling).

Sauvignon Blanc is also used in dessert wines (notably Sauternes and Barsac), with which we are not concerned here.

Factoid: Sauvignon Blanc may or may not be descended from the Savignan grape, but the two are quite distinct today in qualities, despite which Savignan (and Sauvignon Gris, yet another distinct varietal) are often confounded.

Some Descriptions of Sauvignon Blanc Wines

Wikipedia
“Depending on the climate, the flavor can range from aggressively grassy to sweetly tropical. In cooler climates, the grape has a tendency to produce wines with noticeable acidity and ‘green flavors’ of grass, green bell peppers and nettles with some tropical fruit (such as passion fruit) and floral (such as elderflower) notes. In warmer climates, it can develop more tropical fruit notes but risk losing a lot of aromatics from over-ripeness, leaving only slight grapefruit and tree fruit (such as peach) notes. Wine experts have used the phrase ‘crisp, elegant, and fresh’ as a favorable description of Sauvignon blanc from the Loire Valley and New Zealand.”
About.com
“Typically a light to medium-bodied, crisp and refreshing white wine with notable acidity, Sauvignon Blanc offers a fairly wide range of flavors. From herbal taste sensations to veggie, and from flavors of grass, hay and mineral tones to a citrus and tropical flavor mix, Sauvignon Blanc displays a very unique wine tasting adventure.”
Total Wine
“This dry white wine grape offers distinctive flavors of citrus fruit, melon, fig, herb and sometimes grassiness. Sauvignon Blanc [So-Vin-YAWN-Blonk] can also offer vanilla and creamy flavors when introduced to oak. Typically light, crisp and full of fruit, and thrives as the white wine of Bordeaux and is used to produce the delicious Pouilly-Fumé and Sancerre of the Loire Valley. It has also proven extremely successful in California, New Zealand and Chile. Although wonderful with food, it is also the ideal selection for an aperitif.”
Wine Folly
“The primary fruit flavors of Sauvignon Blanc are lime, green apple, passion fruit and white peach. Depending on how ripe the grapes are when the wine is made, the flavor will range from zesty lime to flowery peach. What makes Sauvignon Blanc unique from other white wines are its other herbaceous flavors like bell pepper, jalapeño, gooseberry and grass. These flavors come from aromatic compounds called pyrazines and are the secret to Sauvignon Blanc’s taste.”
DrinkWine.com
“The most salient characteristic of sauvignon blanc is its distinctive, penetrating aroma, which can evoke scents of grapefruit, lime, green melon, gooseberry, passion fruit, freshly mown grass, and bell pepper. Grown in cooler climates and in fertile soils promoting excessive vine growth, herbaceous smells and flavors can dominate the character of the wine, while in warmer regions, the melon, citrus and passion fruit aromas and flavors emerge. Most producers ferment and age their sauvignon blancs in stainless steel to accentuate the wine’s crisp, zesty, bracing qualities, while a few barrel-ferment the wine. Malolactic fermentation is rare, and barrel-aging usually is limited to a few months’ duration.”
Food & Wine
“The best regions for Sauvignon are the Loire Valley in France, where it takes on a firm, minerally depth; New Zealand, where it recalls the tartness of gooseberries and, sometimes, an almost green, jalapeño-like note; California, where it pairs crisp grassiness and a melon-like flavor; and South Africa, particularly the Cape region, where it combines the minerality of France with the rounder fruit of California.”
Wine Searcher
“The key selling point of Sauvignon Blanc is its straightforwardness—the flavors are rarely hidden away in the background. Also, there is a particularly close correlation between the perceived flavors and their descriptors, making Sauvignon Blanc an ideal wine with which to begin wine-tasting lessons. Classic Sauvignon Blanc aromas range from grass, nettles, blackcurrant leaf and asparagus to green apples and gooseberries, and to more esoteric notes such as cats’ pee and gunflint. The latter is a sign of a wine from Pouilly-Fume, where the struck flint aroma (known there as pierre à fusil) derives from the presence of high levels of chert in the local limestone soils. This effect is so pronounced and consistent that Sauvignon Blanc was once widely known as Blanc Fumé in this part of the Loire…Strange as it may seem, bright, green Sauvignon Blanc has much in common with dark-skinned Cabernet Sauvignon, and not just in the name and region of origin. The bell pepper and asparagus flavors detectable in wines of both types are down to the methoxypyrazine flavor compounds in both varieties.”

Some Sauvignon Blancs to Try

There is a plethora of fine SBs on the market: the problem is selecting from that assortment. We could easily have made a rather different list, but after much this-ing and that-ing, this is what we present. (It is interesting that all of these are “New World” renditions of SB.)

For a Splurge

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This page was last modified on Saturday, 30 October 2021, at 11:26 pm Pacific Time.

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