That’s the promise made on the cover of Gourmet Traveller Wine this month, and it’s large a promise the tasting team kept. Savvy has had a lot of bad PR, much of it deserved. I added my two bob’s worth in a piece called Marlborough Men and the death of Sauvignon Blanc – How greedy Kiwis trashed their best brand

Being a purist, I said ‘I don’t see a place for tropical fruit and passionfruit in Sauvignon Blanc, nor sugar snaps and green peas. Hold the boiled veggies, please. The fruit characters I look for in a SB or SB-Semillon blends are herbaceous, not fruity: tangy gooseberry, freshly cut grass, hints of lantana and cats pee, backed by minerally, flinty acid. Not that awful sweet & sour lemon acid.’

In the Oxford Companion to Wine, J Robinson uses words like ‘grassy, herbaceous, musky, green fruits (especially gooseberries), nettles and even tomcats’ to describe Sauvignon Blanc. She adds the observation that the wines from the New World are more perfumed, more pungent and more fruity, with hints of sweetness.

Sugar is a much easier sell

The Kiwis were smart enough to work out that they could sell ten times more savvy if they cut back on the herbs and acid, and filled the void with sugar. As a result, a lot of the Savvies from the shaky isles show more than a passing resemblance to SOLO the soft drink.

Source: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

I’m not alone here. A few years ago, the New York Times’ chief wine critic Eric Asimov invited New York wine merchants to check out 25 NZ Savvies. They found ‘far too few of the bright, vibrant wines that had made New Zealand a worldwide force. Instead, we found too many wines that seemed aimed at being commercially inoffensive. Some were too sweet. Others simply seemed wishy-washy.’ Other comments were that the style had changed, that the wines were conservative. ‘They’re all safe. It’s about moving boxes.’ One of the group called them ‘dumbed down.’

They’re not all whores

In a Globe and Mail piece titled ‘The new Sauvignon Blancs: New Zealand’s great white hope,’ Beppi Crosariol wrote that ‘some producers are toning down the fruit and mowing the grass, so to speak, genuflecting toward Bordeaux as well as Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé in the Loire Valley, France’s standard-bearers for graceful sauvignon blanc.’

‘We wanted to prove that Sauvignon Blanc doesn’t have to be a commercial whore,’ Seresin’s manager Colin Ross told the Globe and Mail. The wine is made from certified organic grapes, which are naturally fermented using wild yeast for added complexity and texture. 10% Semillon is added to the SB, and some of the fruit is fermented in aged French barriques. Yes, it’s about $25 a bottle.

There are others such as Craggy Range, Spy Valley, Dog Point, Neudorf and Greywacke. GTW tossed some of the better ones into a tasting with a few Aussies and Froggies.

GTW’s Star Performers

As usual, price is not much of a guide to quality, which suits us. Here’s GTW’s 5-star line-up:

The underlined wines are high scorers in our price group. I don’t know most of these wines but my fellow wine buffs and I have been impressed by the Greywacke (made by Kevein Judd of Cloudy Bay fame), which is already on our BEST lists. The same goes for Spy Valley and Neudorf. As it happens, we opened a Cloudy Bay 2012 at a blind tasting recently and all thought it was cheap $10 – 15 Kiwi Savvy. None of us would’ve given it 90 or more. How the mighty have fallen.

 As usual, many of these wines are impossible to get hold of. We’ve hunted around and listed the ones under $25 we can find below:

96 – Craggy Range Avery Sauvignon Blanc 2011 (not the 2012, better for it?) $27.50 at Dan M’s

95 – Forrest Estate The Doctors’ Sauvignon Blanc 2012 – $17 at Cracka

95 – Castle Rock Estate Sauvignon Blanc 2012 – $17 at Cracka

95 – Greywacke Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc 2012 – $22 at Winestar

94 – Neudorf Sauvignon Blanc 2012 – $22 at auscellardoor

94 – Allan Scott Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc 2012 – $18 at Wineonline

93 – De Bortoli `Estate Grown` Sauvignon 2011 – $17 at Graysonline

91 – Spy Valley Sauvignon Blanc 2012 – $17 at Dan M’s

We’ll try to get hold of some of these over the next week or two.

Kim