2019 Hans Herzog Sauvignon Blanc Sur Lie, Marlborough

The small, family-run estate of Hans Herzog produces a bewildering array of idiosyncratic wines from a long list of varieties known and unknown, and the estate's version of sauvignon is unsurprisingly a far cry from the Marlborough standard. It's already quite deep gold-coloured, and shows a distinctive, non-sauvignon profile, very low on fruit and dominated by dried hay, old wood, pine bark and other resinous notes, herbal tea, dried flowers and a myriad of other intriguing scents. The palate is full-bodied, fleshy and highly extracted - this is no 15 ton per hectare crop here, but rather ultra low-yielding, dense and concentrated juice, saturated with flavour. Buyers may be shocked at the price, but it's in a category of its own. The only misstep by the winery is to call this a Marlborough sauvignon; buyers of the mainstream commercial versions will be on totally unfamiliar ground. Fans of top quality whites, however, will want to try this. Drink or hold, who knows? A decade should not be a problem. Tasted May 2022

94 points John Szabo winealign.com

Such purity in the fruit allowed for an extended cold maceration to extract the wonderful flavours. After gentle pressing, the must was transferred into 500lt French oak puncheons (30% new), where the wild yeast fermentation naturally started. The wine was then left on the lees with regular stirring to provide silkiness, complexity and depth and had time to mature over 15 months before we bottled this nectar. This wine is not cold stabilized and is unfined with only light filtration to retain the beautiful aromas with a low sulphur addition. Natural sediments may show but do not impact the high quality of this natural wine.