te Pa Reserve Seaside Sauvignon Blanc 2024

Reviews

Erin Larkin, Robert Parker's Wine Advocate: 95/100. The 2024 The Reserve Collection Seaside Sauvignon Blanc is mineral and salty. I love the tension here! It's grassy and green and yet floral, with all the fruit—cut pear, lime, lemon and apple—laced together by briny acidity. This gorgeous wine is highly recommended. The ocean plays such a large role in the personality of this wine. Drink Date:2025 - 2034.

Tasting Note

This wine possesses ripe and generous aromatics of passionfruit, guava, clementines and lime. The palate is dry, but full of fleshy citrus fruit, underpinned by a bright and crunchy mineral acidity. A moreish and unmistakeable impression of salinity speaks of the ocean and leaves no question as to the provenance of this wine.

Aromas and flavours:

Additional information

Type: White wine

Grape variety: 100% Sauvignon Blanc

Food match: Seafood, shellfish, salads, goat cheese

Wine region: Marlborough, New Zealand

Vineyard: Two of the historically best performing blocks in the MacDonald’s Wairau Bar Home Vineyard were selected for higher honours and additional yield and canopy management in 2023. These blocks were shoot thinned and had multiple leaf plucks. Seaside 4 (80%) runs parallel to the beach, at just 200 m from the sea. The soils are compositionally higher in sand and shingle and much lower in organic matter. These bony soils result in fruit with good acidity, citrus and floral notes, and a subtle and intriguing briny/saline character. Block 2 (20%) sits about 1200 m from the beach and 120 m from the Wairau River. It has rich alluvial soils, which support a healthy canopy and give ripe, fleshy stone fruit and exotic flavours.

Vintage summary: The 2023/24 growing season is being recognised as one of the best ever. A dry winter led into a few frost events in spring, and then some cool unsettled weather at flowering which resulted in low bunch and berry numbers. The summer was very much a 'classic Marlborough summer' with warm days and cool nights. One of the driest on record with the prevailing warm nor' westerly winds keeping the vines slightly stressed and berry sizes small. The cool nights and the cooler end to the season slowed things down at just the right time, resulting in concentrated, pure wines with fresh and precise acid structures.

Winemaking: The fruit was handpicked and tipped directly to the press without crushing, and then pressed to stainless steel tanks for cold settling. Only the first cut of free run juice was taken for this wine. The winemaking was kept relatively straight forward, to achieve a pure expression of the vineyard. The juice was rough racked to ferment and inoculated in stainless steel tank. The ferment was left on gross lees for 10 weeks after completion to build in texture and palate weight, and left on light lees post racking for an additional 3 months.

Alcohol: 13.0% vol

Residual sugar: 2.5 g/l

Total acidity: 7.0 g/l

Bottle size: 0.75l

Notice: contains sulphites

Cellaring potential: 2028+

Closure: Screwcap

Ingredients: Grapes, stabilisers: Yeast mannoproteins, packaging gases: nitrogen, preservatives: Potassium metabisulphite (E 224).

Produced and bottled by: te Pa Family Vineyards Ltd, 515 Wairau Bar Road, R.D.3, Blenheim Marlborough, South Island, New Zealand