Parker om:
Sauvignon Blanc
The 2023 Sauvignon Blanc is, as usual, far more than your garden-variety Sauvignon Blanc. Winemaker Virginia Willcock is clever, curious and adventurous, and these attributes shine through in her winemaking. This wine fermented in a combination of vessels, including 65% in French oak formats—foudre, puncheon and barrique—14% in open fermenters and 21% in static fermenters. Fermentation was carried out exclusively with wild yeast. The wine was matured for 12 months in seasoned French oak, including 46% puncheon, 31% foudre, 19% barrique and 4% demi-muid, before a further three months of blended maturation prior to bottling. The 2023 season in Margaret River was marvelous—benevolent, long and mild—and the wines produced in this vintage will be among the best ever produced in this region. Interestingly, they are slow to evolve in bottle, though I look forward to tasting them all again, many more times, before my time is up. They'll only get better as time wears on.