Winemaker Notes
Pale straw. Pure and bright perfume with an array of citrus covering grapefruit, lemon, lime and mandarin. Subtle gravelly tones help to weave another layer of complexity around the fruit. Juicy and fresh upfront, the riper fruit spectrum of stone fruit opens and offers an intense generosity of flavor. It follows through the mid-palate with a refreshing and quenching finish of crystalline acidity.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2024 Sauvignon Blanc leads with a distinct nose of freshly picked curry leaf, crushed sea shells, lemon zest, asphalt, mustard seed, dried coriander/coriander seed and white flesh orchard fruit. This is powerfully fruited, has great energy and drive and, unsurprisingly, offers great pleasure and satisfying drinking. This is a very smart, savory wine here. 13.5% alcohol, sealed under screw cap.
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James Suckling
This is excellent, as always, showing flint, sliced lemons and fresh green melon. Some Thai basil too. Medium body, crisp acidity and lots of fruit at the end but with focus and tension. From organically grown grapes.
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Wine Enthusiast
Dog Point's whites are known for their distinctive flinty, reductive characters that sometimes go too far. But lately, this producer has reined it in, striking the perfect balance so that the white peach and guava fruit shine, too. There's chalky, pithy textural components and a tautness that suggests a happy few years of aging. If drinking now, a little aeration in glass won't hurt.
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Vinous
The 2024 Sauvignon Blanc is far from the wham-bam mass-produced Marlborough style. This is relatively restrained and textural, with far lower yields, hand-harvesting and whole bunch-pressing before most of the wine went through an indigenous fermentation. On first opening, there's a struck match character that needs some air to blow off to reveal lemon and lime, tangy green character of nettles. It's balanced and seamless, exuding a sense of calm in the mouth with an attractive, lightly grippy texture on the refreshing finish.
Almost since its inception, Dog Point has been recognized as among the very top (arguably the very top) wine producers in New Zealand. Their two very different Sauvignon Blancs, their Pinot Noir and their Chardonnay are all wines of astounding quality and complexity not just in the context of New Zealand wines, but globally. Their wines are hand-crafted from estate fruit grown on some of the oldest vines and best sites in Marlborough, some plantings dating back to the 1970s. These older well-established vines situated on free draining silty clay loams are supplemented with fruit from closely planted hillside vines. Yields are low, and the grapes are hand-harvested. That’s our attempt at an understated New Zealand statement: few hand-pick fruit in New Zealand (95% is machine-harvested), and Dog Point’s Sauvignon Blanc yields, for example, are 50% below the average for the region.
Dog Point’s focus on pruning, soil health through organic farming, use of native yeasts and for one wine selected neutral commercial yeasts, all point to a quality and detail-obsessed producer intimately familiar with its region. Dog Point is in fact the result of a collaboration between two Cloudy Bay alumni, enologist James Healy and founding viticulturalist Ivan Sutherland. Both left Cloudy Bay at the end of 2003, and the first vintage of Dog Point released was the 2002 vintage.
The winemaking is non-interventionist, and all the wines (with the exception of the stainless steel Sauvignon Blanc) are given extended barrel aging with minimal racking and handling. Bottling is done without fining and with minimal filtration. The resulting wines are intense, complex, with racy natural acidity and ripe, full fruit flavors.
The name Dog Point dates from the earliest European settlement of Marlborough and the introduction of sheep to the district. These were the days of few fences, of boundary riders and boundary-keeping dogs. Shepherds’ dogs sometimes became lost or wandered off and eventually bred into a wild pack. Their home was a tussock and scrub covered hill, overlooking the Wairau Plains, designated by the early settlers as Dog Point.
Capable of a vast array of styles, Sauvignon Blanc is a crisp, refreshing variety that equally reflects both terroir and varietal character. Though it can vary depending on where it is grown, a couple of commonalities always exist—namely, zesty acidity and intense aromatics. This variety is of French provenance. Somm Secret—Along with Cabernet Franc, Sauvignon Blanc is a proud parent of Cabernet Sauvignon. That green bell pepper aroma that all three varieties share is no coincidence—it comes from a high concentration of pyrazines (herbaceous aromatic compounds) inherent to each member of the family.
An icon and leading region of New Zealand's distinctive style of Sauvignon blanc, Marlborough has a unique terroir, making it ideal for high quality grape production (of many varieties). Despite some common generalizations, which could be fairly justified given that Marlborough is responsible for 90% of New Zealand's Sauvignon blanc production, the wines from this region are actually anything but homogenous. At the northern tip of New Zealand’s South Island, the vineyards of Marlborough benefit from well-draining, stony soils, a dry, sunny climate and wide temperature fluctuations between day and night, a phenomenon that supports a perfect balance between berry ripeness and acidity.
The region’s king variety, Sauvignon blanc, is beloved for its pungent, aromatic character with notes of exotic tropical fruit, freshly cut grass and green bell pepper along with a refreshing streak of stony minerality. These wines are made in a wide range of styles, and winemakers take advantage of various clones, vineyard sites, fermentation styles, lees-stirring and aging regimens to differentiate their bottlings, one from one another.
Also produced successfully here are fruit-forward Pinot noirs (especially where soils are clay-rich), elegant Riesling, Pinot gris and Gewürztraminer.