2021 Meltwater Wairau Valley Sauvignon Blanc, Marlborough

This is a fresh and fruity wine with flavours of white flesh fruits, like peach and pear, with citrus notes and good minerality.

Organic. As you would expect of this producer, Meltwater’s hand-crafted Marlborough Sauvignon hits all the right notes, with considerably more texture and interest than this category typically delivers. For a start, it’s low-cropped from a single, certified organic vineyard in the southern foothills of the Wairau Valley. The grapes were hand-harvested into small bins and indigenous yeast fermentation occurred in tank. —an even rarer approach! For good measure, Paterson explains that during natural fermentation, a good portion of malic acidity drops out of the wine. This results in more palate breadth and means he can ferment all the sugars without having to rely on artificial balance. The wine was aged on lees for nine months over winter.

What Mike and Anna Paterson don’t know about Marlborough you could probably fit on the back of a postage stamp. And, with each passing vintage, Corofin further consummates its position among New Zealand’s most exciting producers. Now we have a new chapter in the story. The small but perfectly formed 2021 vintage provided the impetus to act on a years-long desire to add a ‘Villages’ Marlborough Chardonnay and Pinot Noir to their range. From a year when yields were so miserly, Corofin could not feasibly make the usual range of single-vineyard wines, and so 2021 marks the first release of its Marlborough blends.