Wine at Five

Each year we try and find a wine that woos us, preferably wows us, but positively is us. Two years ago we bought the remaining stock of a little New Zealand winery, Gravitas. It was not a happy story but we did what we could to help out the young couple that tragically owned the Gravitas winery – a motor-bike accident and a subsequent cancer diagnosis put the winery into bankruptcy (although I understand that the winery has now been bought). It was not the greatest label on earth, but the important fact was the wine delivered way more than the price we sold it at. We don’t intentionally seek out tragic stories to profit from the misfortunes of others, and in the case of Gravitas we agreed to purchase the East Coast inventory so that the importers could remit finances back to the winery, which helped pay medical bills etc. Last year we found an amazing group of wines from Southern France, the Domaine Lalaurie. Unfortunately this year they decided to remodel their ‘cepages’ and whilst I really liked their chardonnay, it was the sauvignon blanc that I was driven to – and they stopped making it!

This year we have found another winner, we think. It’s again from New Zealand, from two distinct and very different vineyards in the Marlborough Valley at the northern tip of South Island. Sauvignon is the quintessential spring and summer wine and what we look for, especially from New Zealand, are those fresh grassy notes that hint of acidity from popping gooseberries in your mouth, a touch of exotic fruit but absolutely nothing OTT. What we don’t want is oversaturated Kiwi fruit and Mango Salsa, we don’t want a sauvignon dripping in Oak, and we don’t want a sauvignon stinking of cat’s pee. They say that those that want don’t get – wrong. We found it.

Konrad Sauvignon Blanc is from the Konrad (surprising that!) Winery. The winery was planted in 1996 by the Hengstler family – a German family that had emigrated to Australia some 20 years prior. Bedazzled by the wines from the Marlborough river during a business trip to New Zealand, Konrad Hengstler was determined to make wine under his own family label, in New Zealand and so just upped and quit Australia and began his dream. Remarkably his family followed him! The winery is now entirely a family affair; they make a little Riesling but their aim is to perfect Pinot Noir and Sauvignon Blanc.

The Sauvignon is stainless steel fermented, although Konrad does ferment 3% of the harvest in neutral French oak barrels – to round the wine out and give it a hint more complexity. And then he leaves the juice on the lees for 3 months which adds another level of flavors without adding those cloying tastes that Marlborough Sauvignon’s are becoming known for. All of this and he keeps the wine below 12.5% alcohol. When we first tasted it I felt that here was a wine that New Zealand needed in order to regain some of the lost momentum that Cloudy Bay inadvertently created; Cloudy Bay became the symbol of great New Zealand Sauvignon, then it became the symbol of viticultural greed and once it started producing mass production wine it became the symbol of everything that had gone wrong with NZ sauvignon. I am hoping that Konrad will put back some of my trust, at least, in Marlborough Sauvignon.

And here’s the best part – we negotiated with the importers, who in turn negotiated with their distributors, and we bought, again, the East Coast allocation allowing us to sell the wine at $15.00, not $20.00. We’ll open some of it this coming Saturday so if you are in the mood stop by after Noon and sip on a glass of Sauvignon, we want to know what our customers think about the wine.

Konrad 2009 Sauvignon Blanc: MSRP $20.00. Wine at Five: $15.00 single bottle; $162.00 cs/$13.50 btl.

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This entry was posted by WinebyCai on Wednesday, March 16th, 2011 at 7:55 am and is filed under Cellar Specials, Daily Mutterings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.