Sauvignon Blanc, Canterbury, New Zealand

A cloudy, saline, skin-contact ode to the New Zealand coastline. The Hermit Ram is a culty collaboration between Theo Coles and Gareth Renowden in Canterbury - a small region on the South Island flanked by the more famous regions of Marlborough to the north and Central Otago to the south-west. Already overshadowed by the global dominance of New Zealand Sauv Blanc (you know it well as lime, zesty gooseberries covered in cat pee), The Hermit Ram offers a truly unique take on the country’s workhouse grape. The extremely limited supply of this rare beauty comes from two sites in the Waipara Valley, just north of Christchurch. Most of the fruit is destemmed and fermented on skins for six weeks, while a small amount undergoes whole-cluster semi-carbonic-maceration - a bunch of insider jargon that means some whole bunches of grapes are kind of submerged in grape juice and these bunches start fermentation inside the berries, causing them to burst. The goal here isn’t to make a gritty, overly extracted skin-contact version of something already quite familiar. What we get is perhaps the rawest, most ‘un-international’, form of New Zealandness from a grape who’s popularity peaked in the early 2000s. Did somebody say ‘comeback’?! Orange-apricot marmalade on rye toast followed by a sip of Jasmine tea. Refreshing, complex, and delightfully curious.