Wine & Spirits - Fall 2017 - 33

Sauvignon Blanc
by Tara Q. Thomas

Illustration by Siobhán Thomas-Bupphavesa

Sauvignon blanc has become the white-wine variety of the moment,
loved for its bright, zingy fruit-and-herb scents and flavors. Yet, say "I like
sauvignon blanc" to a sommelier and you haven't given them much to
work with.
"When people say they want a sauvignon blanc, you
have to figure out if they mean the lean, mineral,
severe, linear, crisp and grassy style. Or the New Zealand style-more round, ripe. Or even a creamy style;
some people are thinking of Napa sauvignon blanc,
and that tends to have a leesy and creamy texture,"
says Sarah Trubnick of the Barrel Room in San Francisco. "If you put these wines side by side, people
will think they are made from different grapes, they
taste so different."
As with any wine, climate is the biggest cue to its
general style, but the stakes are potentially higher
with sauvignon blanc than most varieties. The grape
is naturally high in pyrazines, flavor compounds that
have an herbal or vegetal aroma. Bell peppers, for
example, are full of pyrazines, and so is asparagus;
both flavors frequently appear in a glass of sauvignon blanc. Fresh-cut grass is another common note.
The concentration of pyrazines in a grape drops as
it ripens, and with exposure to the sun. So if you're
not into herbal sauvignons, look to warm and/or
sunny climates, like Napa or inland Sonoma in California, or Marlborough, New Zealand, where abundant sun moderates the effect of the cool climate.
Then, with the accent on fruit, the question
becomes, what sort? The grape is especially high
in thiols, compounds responsible for the flavor of
grapefruit, gooseberries, passion fruit and guavas-
four of the most common fruit descriptors for sauvignon. (Thiols are also responsible for the scent of
cat pee, but that's a different story.)
As you might expect, the more acidic fruits show
up more commonly in cooler climates, where the
grapes retain lots of their acidity-say, the Pacific
coast of Chile, or France's Loire Valley. Tropical fruit
notes are more common in warmer spots, where the
grapes get more sweetly ripe.
Note, however, that these are tricky generalizations to make, as the winemaker has tools to bring

out those thiols: Machine-harvested grapes have
higher levels of thiols, as do sauvignon blancs that
have been macerated with their skins or fermented
at low temperatures and/or with special yeasts. It's
this ease of manipulating the variety that's made
it easy to find so many juicy, appealing sauvignon
blancs on the market-and that makes it possible to
find a passion fruit-scented sauvignon blanc from
the cool Atlantic coast of France, for instance, or,
for that matter, Sancerre, perhaps the best-known
appellation for sauvignon blanc.
"Sancerre is as complex as the Côte de Beaune, a
beautiful appellation with a lot of different soil types,
expositions and microclimates," says Pascaline Lepeltier, a Loire native who runs Rouge Tomate in New
York City. The region, so far up the Loire Valley it's
nearly in the middle of France, has been famed for its
wines since at least the 11th century. The summers
here are fairly cool and cloudy, so the wines tend
toward the lean, acidic and herbal, but the real draw
is their stony underpinnings, a reflection of the soils
they grow in, a sense of the region's cool, green hills.
Sancerre isn't the only place in the Loire to look
for great examples of lean, mineral sauvignon blanc:
Try Pouilly-Fumé, Quincy and Reuilly as well.
Or seek out examples from other cool-climate
regions: Chile has become a sauvignon powerhouse
over the last two decades, turning out vividly crisp
and mineral wines from the Pacific coast in Casablanca, San Antonio and Limarí Valley.
South Africa's wind-whipped Cape is another good
source.
And though New Zealand is known for the rich,
fruity style of Marlborough sauvignon blanc, it's possible to find lean, crisp versions on the South Island,
says Brett Feore of The Musket Room, a New York
restaurant dedicated to New Zealand cuisine: He
heads farther south, toward the Antarctic, to Central Otago, for his stony-sauvignon fix.

"Like chardonnay,
sauvignon can
express an infinite
amount of nuances,
depending on the
terroirs."
-Pascaline
Lepeltier,
Rouge Tomate,
New York City

WINE & SPIRITS

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