Loveblock Tee Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc 2019 $26.99
Straight out the gate this is unlike any sauvignon blanc I’ve tasted recently. Perfumed with lemon verbena, lemongrass, soft herbaceousness and a whisker of marzipan, on the palate it’s crunchy-fresh and flinty, edged with green apple, white nectarine and mandarin. It’s a fun, frisky, flavoursome new release from fruit grown in the Woolshed block on Loveblock’s Awatere Valley farm. Not only is this sauvignon fully certified organic, instead of using sulphur, (the traditional preservative employed in winemaking to stave off the risk of pesky oxygen contamination), they’ve actually used green tea powder instead. That’s right. Green tea, or more specifically (camelia sinesis). It’s powdered form, Ti Premium® SG was added at 5mg/l at the stages in the winemaking process where the wine was exposed to oxygen. So that’s at harvest, crushing, post-ferment racking, filtration and bottling. So why green tea? Well it’s a registered wine additive, so it’s totally above-board, plus it’s been used for centuries in China and Japan for its health-giving qualities and more recently its being revived as an ingredient in medicines and beauty products, so why not look at its abilities in wine? The name TEE is Afrikaans for ‘tea’ and its a nod to owner Erica Crawford’s heritage and second language. It’s an attractive thing indeed.
