te Pa Sauvignon Blanc 2024

Reviews & accolades

International Wine Challenge 2025: 95/100 & Gold. Opulent and ripe combined with passion fruit and guava. Intense with great depth and concentration on a refreshing finish. A benchmark example.

Cameron Douglas MS: 94/100. An excellent bouquet, aromatic, lively, fresh, and pungent with scents of tropical fruits and crunchy red apple, a mix of fresh basil and sage-like herbaceous qualities and a distinctive graywacke wet stone scent. Crisp, dry, flavorful and delicious, a wine that is perfect now and through 2027.

MaryAnn Worobiec, Wine Spectator: 90/100 & Wine Spectator's Top 100 List 2025. Appealing for its generous flavors of mandarin orange, passion fruit, lime zest and yuzu at the core. There's an appealingly fleshy, juicy texture and plenty of momentum on the finish, where lemon balm and ginger linger. Drink now.

Decanter World Wine Awards 2025: Silver & 92/100. Fruit-driven, enticing floral bouquet with apple, lime and peach notes. Dry and delicious with fresh acidity and appealing textured palate.

Erin Larkin, Robert Parker's Wine Advocate: 92/100.This 2024 Sauvignon Blanc is a blend of the Hillside and Beachside vineyards, and the wine has both minerality and salinity; it is crunchy and full of fruit flavor, kept on the rails by rocks, shells, phenolics and acid. It's excellent. The wine speaks of the places from whence it came. Drink Date:2025 - 2029.

International Wine and Spirit Competition 2025: 90/100 & Silver. Aromas of lime zest and white grapefruit, complemented by notes of gooseberry. On the palate, juicy fruit flavours of apricot and under-ripe peach emerge, supported by a clean, zesty character.

James Suckling (JamesSuckling.com): 90/100. Aromas of orchids, lemons and cut grass. The palate is light-bodied with a focused acidity, giving notes of quince, green pears and bell peppers. Fresh and pure.

New Zealand International Wine Show 2024: Silver.

Tasting Note

This wine is beautifully perfumed with notes of white peach, guava, feijoa, fresh peas and nettle. The palate is super concentrated and precise, with zesty citrus and summer stone fruit flavours, complimented by subtle hints of jalapeno, sage, and wet river stones. This wine possesses crisp, refreshing acidity and a unique mineral saline finish.

Aromas and flavours:

Additional information

Type: White wine

Grape varial: 100% Sauvignon Blanc

Food match: A great match with all seafood, particularly shellfish. The crisp flavours work well with fresh summer salads or soft goat cheese. Try this wine with mussel ravioli in a lemon beurre blanc sauce.

Wine region: Marlborough, New Zealand

Vineyards: 60% MacDonald Family Home Vineyard, Wairau Bar. 40% Redwood Hills, Awetare Valley. The fruit from the MacDonald Home Vineyard came from some of the historically best performing blocks in the vineyard. The Seaside Block is compositionally higher in sand and shingle and has less organic matter. This block tends to give passionfruit and tropical flavours with nice bright acids. Blocks 1 and 5 have richer alluvial and sedimentary soils, which supports a healthy canopy and gives more tropical and exotic fruit flavours. The naturally low vigour, low yielding Redwood Hills Vineyard in the Awatere Valley produces wines with strong textural and mineral elements. This cooler hillside site results in wines which exhibit concentration, fresh acidity, and great length.

Vintage: The 2023/24 growing season, on reflection is now 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 drought, combined with the low yields and high sunshine hours meant that harvest was underway early as sugar levels in the grapes accumulated quickly. The cool nights and the cooler end to the season, slowed things down at just the right time. Somewhat surprisingly, crisp acidity is a feature of the vintage. The 2024 wines are concentrated, pure and possess ripe generous flavours with fresh and precise acid structures.

Winemaking: The blocks that made the te Pa blend were selected for their superior fruit expression and concentration. The blocks were fermented separately, mostly in stainless steel tanks, before blending and then aging on light lees. A small percentage (2%) of barrel fermented Sauvignon Blanc was used in the blend to contribute richness and texture.

Alcohol: 13% vol

Residual sugar: 2.5g/l

Total acidity: 7.47 g/l

Bottle size: 0.75l

Notice: contains sulphites

Cellaring potential: 2027

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