Sailing on a Cloudy Bay

2004 Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc
Marlborough, New Zealand
Jen’s Notes
$22.99

This wine is quite hard to find outside your local swanky restaurant's wine list. We picked it up at Draeger's in San Mateo, after reading that it is one of Andrea Immer's (author of Great Wine Made Simple) favorite Sauvignon Blancs.

While Shane and I both agreed that it was a particularly well-crafted SB, and totally unique at that, one of us actually did not like it. Now, usually, this is something that happens when I bring home a particularly funky old Burgundy, redolent of the wine maker's socks and a dash of soy sauce. Shane might agree that it is a well made wine; but he probably does not like it. This time, I was the one who was less than thrilled.

The wine showed the palest straw color, very nearly clear. Its aromas were grassy, compost-y, nearly rotting. On the palate, the wine was intensely grassy and full of juicy lime flavors, almost reminiscent of Shasta Lemon-lime. Despite all this citrus, the flavors were not unpleasantly puckery at all. The Kim Crawford SB, by contrast, was quite puckery.

We had never tasted anything quite like this. And, although I normally embrace the funkier wines, I tend to prefer that funky SBs err on the side of minerality (wet rocks, flintiness and the like). The grassiness and intense lime flavors bugged me a bit, and I prefer the rotting/barnyard flavors in a red wine. On the other hand, Shane loved the grassiness and massive lime flavor and thought it was one of the best SBs he has ever tasted.