While Outstanding, 2021 Vintage Sauvignon Blanc Faced Myriad Difficulties and Is Scarce

Sauvignon Blanc is the third-most-planted white grape variety on the planet. Its wines are known for their bracingly high acidity and almost savage character, sometimes described as jalapeño, cat pee, or canned green beans. Whatever the terminology, it’s probably this distinctive nature with a narrow range of typicity that has long made it one of the world’s most popular wines. The grape hails from France’s northern Central Loire Valley, and most famously the subregion of Sancerre, where it has been grown for hundreds of years. Here it reaches its pinnacle, laced with chalky or occasionally flinty minerality, white flowers, zesty citrus, and, in warmer years, apricot or white peach. Most are fermented at cool temperature in stainless steel to retain its brisk acid and delicate high tones, but the best spend time in used oak for more depth, allowing them to coalesce into magnificent, ageworthy gems.While present in nearly every wine region, the grape found its second home a long way from France: in beautiful Marlborough, New Zealand. Considering its ubiquity in the marketplace, it’s astonishing to realize there wasn’t a Sauvignon Blanc vine planted here before 1973. The jalapeño, passion fruit, gooseberry, and pink grapefruit notes are so marked that they’ve defined their own style, a fruity, buoyant antithesis to the Loire’s mineral-laden wines.Unfortunately for lovers of either type, the 2021 vintage was terribly difficult in both France and New Zealand, especially Sancerre and Marlborough, with yields down as much as 80 percent in some vineyards. Vines were battered with frost after bud break; poor weather at flowering led to millerandage; hail destroyed whole plants; not enough precipitation stressed out the vines; too much rain led to rot and mildew infections; wildfires tainted berries with smoke; and Covid outbreaks gave us the double-edged sword of labor shortages in the vineyards and overconsumption of existing stocks. So, while quality was generally outstanding, the wines are going to be scarce.Lucky for us there are several alternatives: Regions like Casablanca in Chile and Stellenbosch in South Africa make similar fruit and green bell pepper tinged wine for the New Zealand camp. Yet with most of France suffering the same fate as Sancerre, our usual French alternatives like the glorious Semillon-blended Bordeaux examples are also in short supply. There is one more, often overlooked region with a long history of making savory, old-world, styled Sauvignon Blanc: Styria, Austria.A recent three-day journey to the region left me with one simple, overarching assessment: The wines here are good; almost all of them are very, very good, and we should all be drinking more of them. With 2021’s above average quality and normal yields, there are also enough to go around. They showcase stone fruit with citrus, most avoid jalapeño but with brisk, racy acidity and clean, salty, or stoney minerality.While even the simplest wine was good enough for me on a hot summer day, I would keep an eye out for these above-average producers: Neumeister, Gross, Lackner-Tinnacher, and Tement.

While Outstanding, 2021 Vintage Sauvignon Blanc Faced Myriad Difficulties and Is Scarce

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