Mahi Sauvignon Blanc 2008

Matthew Jukes Top 60 New Zealand Wines of 2009

Another beautiful wine from one of the masters of the craft, Brian Bicknell, who made his name in New Zealand as winemaker for Seresin Wines. Brian, who is one of the most able and knowledgeable winemakers in Marlborough, established his own label Mahi in 2001.  

"Impressively concentrated wine with plenty of weight and flavours resembling mineral, lemon grass and gooseberry with a hint of yeast character. Good acidity snuggles into the fruit. Bone dry with a soft texture. An individual and appealing Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc."  Bob Campbell MW

"This Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc shows a range of fruit characters, from citrus through to tropical notes, aligned with some secondary characters from natural yeast ferments. The palate has an elegant structure with a textural mid-palate and a long finish.

The fruit was taken straight to press at our winery in Renwick. The final blend was made solely from free-run juice with the pressed wine being sold off. The juice was fermented cool to retain the fruit characters and then held on yeast lees for three months to gain palate richness and texture. A small portion of this was kept in older French oak to once again add complexity."  Mahi

Expert reviews

"Impressively concentrated wine with plenty of weight and flavours resembling mineral, lemon grass and gooseberry with a hint of yeast character. Good acidity snuggles into the fruit. Bone dry with a soft texture. An individual and appealing Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc."  Bob Campbell MW, The Real Review - 92 points

Awards

Matthew Jukes Top 60 New Zealand Wines of 2009

About the winemaker

The following article by Jamie Goode appeared in wineamorak.com

Brian Bicknell has made wine in the Marlborough region since 1989, so he knows the region pretty well. But he’s also had spells abroad, providing much needed context. Most significantly, he was chief winemaker at Viña Errazuriz in Chile until 1996, when he returned to the region to take the job as senior winemaker at the newly created Seresin.

In 2001, after five years at Seresin, Bicknell decided he wanted to do his own thing. So he resigned in order to start Mahi. But owner Michael Seresin persuaded him to stay, and so for the next five years Bicknell built up Mahi while he still had the day job, making his Mahi wines in the Seresin cellar. Eventually, in 2006 he left and bought a winery.

What is currently the Mahi Winery in Renwick was originally Cellier Le Brun, run by Daniel Le Brun. Le Brun was one of the very first wineries in the region, and originally opened its doors in 1984, when there were just a couple of other wineries based in Marlborough. Along with the winery, Bicknell bought the Daniel Le Brun label and with it 600,000 bottles of sparkling wine. He ended up selling the label and the sparkling wine stocks to Lion Nathan, but kept the winery.

For the first four years all the wines were single vineyard, and this has been an emphasis of Bicknell’s work ever since, aiming to demonstrate that Marlborough isn’t just a single, homogeneous region. 'You get massive differences in flavour from different sites,' he says. He mainly focuses on the western end of the Wairau valley, which is cooler and lower cropping.

His winemaking style? 'I want to get juice away from skins, so I hand pick or machine pick to bin, and don’t use pressings.' He says that press wines get potassium from the skins which makes them taste a bit soapy on the palate. 'There’s no protein fining, just bentonite. The low skin contact results in low phenolics.' Bicknell’s preferred wine style is to be 'subtle at the front with a nice long elegant palate.'

Bicknell works with six vineyards, and three of these are hand picked and put over a sorting table. The rest is machine picked to bin, which means that the bin can be tipped straight into the press so the fruit only gets moved twice. Around 10% of the ferments are done wild in barrel.

Every year he gets 300-400 European winemakers applying to do vintage at Mahi, and he has room for seven. He’s now done 32 vintages, so if you multiply that by seven or so each year, he’s worked with a lot of people. Each year, Bicknell tends to go and do vintage with  Jean Max Roger in Sancerre, which is a really good producer.

About the winery

Brian Bicknell had been making wine in different parts of the world for about 15 years before deciding to return to New Zealand and settle in Marlborough. Arriving in 1996, he could see that vineyards in the different valleys of Marlborough produced remarkably unique profiles. At the time, most of Marlborough’s wines were made as regional blends with many individual site characteristics being lost. In other areas of the world distinctive sites were being celebrated and so an idea was hatched to create a label that promoted different vineyard sites across Marlborough to show the region had true depth and complexity.

This idea of a new label had been formed for some time but it was when Brian’s father developed terminal cancer the realization of his own mortality proved to be the impetus that was needed to finally start making the wines of Mahi.

The very first harvest was from a vineyard located in the Conder’s Bend part of Marlborough. An area Brian was familiar with. Initial quantities were tiny from this small 1.5 hectare parcel of Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir from the Byrne vineyard. Mahi now manages the vineyard organically and are thrilled to still be working with the site that started it all.

Brian’s winemaking style for Mahi is to allow the vineyards to speak through the wines, with the wines being made in a very 'hands-off' manner. For all of the Mahi single-vineyard wines the fruit is hand-picked and sorted prior to being 'whole-cluster' pressed at the winery. Fermentation is done with the indigenous yeasts that arrive on the grapes, and if barrels are used these will be French, as they give a more savoury character to the wines. With the Pinot Noir everything is hand-plunged and to date all have been bottled unfiltered, allowing the true vineyard expression to come through.

In 2003 another vineyard, Twin Valleys, was selected, located in a distinctive part of the Wairau Valley, being in Fareham Lane area, which is quite far west in the valley, meaning slightly cooler temperatures and longer ripening times. The vineyard had no Sauvignon planted and the focus was on the Burgundian varieties of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. In 2003 only Chardonnay was available and the eventual wine proved to be stunning. Since then a series of elegant Chardonnays have come from this parcel and from 2006 onwards Pinot Noir and Gewurztraminer have also been made from this parcel. In 2007 the owners, Pete and Anne Reed, purchased a vineyard close by in the Guernsey Lane district and planted it to Sauvignon Blanc. This Sauvignon continues to play a very important role in our regional 'Marlborough' Sauvignon Blanc.

In 2004 an opportunity to take some Sauvignon Blanc from a vineyard closer to the sea presented itself and since then the Francis Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc has been produced. Being on a slightly more fertile and warmer site the wines have exhibited a richer palate and more tropical notes on the nose than Byrne, and the comparison of these two wines exhibit perfectly the original idea of the label. The Francis family has a long history with Brian and Nicola as Polly Francis had worked five vintages with Brian and worked the first vintage at the Mahi winery in 2007.

The next major step forward for Mahi was when Brian resigned from his role as winemaker at Seresin in July 2006 to focus solely on Mahi and his consultancy clients in Marlborough and Chile. This opened a range of opportunities, with the key one ending with the purchase of the historic winery that had made the wines of Cellier Le Brun since 1984.

With the purchase of the winery a lease of an excellent vineyard was taken up and another very good grower was also added. The greater numbers of vineyards meant that the focus was broadened as the winery could not efficiently sell and distribute six single-vineyard Sauvignons and with the 2007 vintage the first 'Marlborough' Sauvignon was produced.

Marlborough sub-regions