ASTROLABE
TAIHOA Sauvignon Blanc 2024 750ml

When I’m looking to make my most unique sauvignon blanc, I go to the most unique area of Marlborough to do it. The fruit for this wine is grown by Paddy and Anna Trolove at Taihoa Vineyard on Marlborough’s southern Kēkerengū coast. This wine is a bit of a sentimental favourite for me. It is an outlier, both geographically and in a winemaking sense, to the typical sauvignon blanc wines of Marlborough; it is all about complexity, texture and age-worthiness.

The grapes for my Taihoa Sauvignon blanc are grown with organic management and a low-cropping regime on a beautiful little terrace, high above the sea. We expose the fruit more to the sun by taking leaf away from around the bunches. When it gets to the right stage of ripeness, it’s hand-picked and taken as whole bunches back to the winery, where we press it in the champagne-style method to delicately get the free-run juice away.

Cuvée juice is wild fermented in old 500 litre oak puncheons that have seen several years of chardonnay and then retained in barrel for extended maturation. I find that the wild yeast from this site has a very unique character. This sauvignon blanc is all about the wild yeast, high solids ferment, aging on yeast lees and a little bit of the nuances that come from the Kēkerengū area. I am crafting a wine with a very linear, focused structure around which I can build beautiful textures.

This is an ageworthy sauvignon blanc for the connoisseur who wishes to keep it for the long haul.

Simon Waghorn — Winemaker