Wine · Medium strength

Sauvignon Blanc

Grapefruit, cut grass, and a cold snap of pure refreshment.

How to order it: Marlborough for tropical punch, Sancerre for mineral elegance.

The story

Born in France's Loire Valley and Bordeaux, Sauvignon Blanc spent centuries as a respectable supporting player — and, through an old field crossing with Cabernet Franc, became a parent of Cabernet Sauvignon itself. Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé made it aristocratic: flinty, restrained, mineral. Then New Zealand happened. Vines planted in Marlborough in the 1970s produced something nobody in the Loire would have signed off on — explosive passionfruit, gooseberry, cut grass — and when Cloudy Bay's 1985 vintage reached London, the wine world's map was quietly redrawn. A Southern Hemisphere upstart had given an old French grape a second identity, and arguably the louder one. The Loire still insists its version is the original. It is.

Adjacent pours