WHITE FLIGHT
GERRIE LIM catches up with Cloudy Bay’s technical director Jim White over the spectacular, newly released 2018 Sauvignon Blanc
Catch up with Cloudy Bay’s
technical director Jim White over the
new 2018 Sauvignon Blanc
ask jim white, 45, what most excites him now and his answer is piquantly personal. “I’m just about to get my New Zealand citizenship,” he says with a laugh. In his third winemaking job and the best one yet — he’s the technical director of Cloudy Bay, the spiritual home of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc — the former Melbourne resident has two young kids, aged seven and nine, and shares that the island country “is a great place to bring up children. From a career perspective, I’d be happy to do this for many years to come.”
The wines, of course, are sensual and unique. “Cloudy Bay has been my mother’s favourite wine since 1987,” he confides. “There were bottles of it in the fridge, and they weren’t to be opened except on my mum’s birthday and Christmas. This was before I worked in wine, in the late 1980s in Melbourne. My dad had a friend in the wine trade and you could only buy six bottles of Cloudy Bay every year. It was very precious, available in very limited quantities and on strict allocation.”
The most important thing about his job, he says, is “to make wines that say something about where we’re from”. White works in Wairau Valley, and was previously at Domaine Chandon in Yarra Valley and then Cape Mentelle in Western Australia, which was where I first met him. He now heads the Cloudy Bay winemaking team, as second-in-command to estate director Yang Shen, who comes from Sichuan, China.
“We’re the New World, with very unique climate and soils. We want to make wines that express our grape varieties, particularly the vibrancy, freshness and aromas of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. It’s a level of sophistication; with wines that are elegant, it’s not just about aroma, but also about palette and texture.”
Cloudy Bay — named after the body of water discovered by Captain James Cook in 1770 — was established by Cape Mentelle founder David Hohnen, with founding winemaker Kevin Judd, in 1985, and is now part of LVMH’s Moët Hennessy Diageo wine division. For its 2018 vintage Sauvignon Blanc, the company 34th, fermentation was done primarily in stainless steel tanks — with some 7 percent of the blend fermented at warmer temperatures in old French oak barriques and large format vats for added texture and structure; bottling commenced in July 2018. “Ultimately, it’s about the quality of the fruit coming to you,” he notes. “We don’t want our wines to be overly green and herbaceous.”
Compared to the previous vintage, though, the newly released 2018 is considered spectacularly good. “2017 was cooler and we were forced to harvest earlier than we would’ve ideally liked,” White says with a shrug, recalling the toughest vintage of his life so far. “The harvest was punctuated by one rainfall event and another looming — an even worse one. We chose to pick our grapes between those two events. We didn’t see the level of flavour ripeness that we would’ve liked, but it was still lime-green citrus, crunchy but not-quite-ripe green.”
“This year, we had that clean citrus nose,” he declares. “We were waiting for the final three days of ripening and there was rainfall predicted, like 20 or 30ml, so the fruit was ripe for four days, but we ended up with 80ml of rain! The fruit was so ripe and ready to harvest that it started to degrade very quickly, so we had to
kick into gear. In the end, we lost a significant amount of grapes; we just could not see the quality, so 25 or 30 percent of that didn’t go into the Cloudy Bay wine. It’s a blip in the radar though — I’d rather have less wine than make a wine we’re not proud of.”
Also critical are the brand’s other wines — a sparkling wine called Pelorus, two Sauvignon Blancs (the other, also from Marlborough, is called Te Koko), two Pinot Noirs (one from Marlborough and the other from Central Otago; the cellar door for the latter, called Te Wahi, opened this July) and a Chardonnay. But it’s really the vineyards of Marlborough that count, not the grapes that have gone awry. “We were making Riesling and Gewurztraminer and Pinot Gris, and we stopped those in late 2010; they’re really not great,” he concedes. “But we’ve got great Sauvignon Blanc land that used to grow Pinot Gris and great Pinot Noir country that we used to grow Riesling on, and we’ve replanted it all.”
Now, it’s “about transferring what we have in the vineyard as cleanly and elegantly as possible into the bottle,” he shares. “Winemaking for Sauvignon Blanc is really about precision — controlled temperature and cultured yeast. Making Sauvignon Blanc has been described as very naked — there’s nothing to hide behind. I find I like the layers on the palette and the way it changes in the glass, as it sits on the table.”
Highly influential to him was a trip he made to the Sancerre region of France five years ago, where Sauvignon Blanc is grown. “The thing I really like about the wines from Sancerre isn’t the aromatic profile,” White explains. “They’re quite shy aromatically and they don’t really have a lot of fruit, but what they have is a lot of texture, with the chalky acidity. It’s wine that takes it to another level.”
“Sauvignon Blanc has clear and distinctive flavours of citrus, kaffir lime, passion fruit and white stone fruit,” he concludes. “It’s a wine you can talk about, but it’s also a wine that you should be able to drink. Despite all the other things you want to think about, it should be just delicious.”
“Making Sauvignon Blanc has been described as very naked — there’s nothing to hide
behind.”
— Jim White