New Zealand Whites: Never Gonna Give You Up

BY REBECCA GIBB, MW | MARCH 25, 2025

Rick Astley is forever tied to “Never Gonna Give You Up.” The 1987 breakthrough hit made him a household name. But if you’re asked to think of another Rick Astley hit, you’ll likely draw a blank. It’s the song people want at every concert. It’s the song that gets played on ‘80s radio stations day in and day out. It’s the song that pays the bills—Astley is worth an estimated $16 million—and it has kept him in the public eye for the past 40 years. He has other songs, but the world only wants “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Astley must feel like he’s stuck on repeat.  This is the same dilemma facing many New Zealand winemakers when it comes to Sauvignon Blanc. The grape has been the country’s star performer, earning global recognition and securing New Zealand’s place in the global wine market. But while it continues to pay the bills and bring in praise, there’s a growing frustration with the idea of being defined by just one variety. New Zealand’s winemakers are inextricably linked with Sauvignon Blanc, but they can’t help but wonder what it might be like to be known for something else.

Rick Astley’s voice filled our ghetto blasters in the same period as Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc burst onto the international wine charts. This white wine style was as fresh and distinctive as Astley’s baritone voice and marked the beginnings of New Zealand’s global reputation as a wine producer. Marlborough was—and remains—the engine room of the country’s Sauvignon Blanc production. Such is the variety’s success in this corner of New Zealand’s South Island that the region’s output accounts for 72% of the country’s total wine production. The country has a remarkably short history compared with other New World wine nations. In fact, 2025 marks just 50 years since the first 50 acres of Sauvignon Blanc vines were planted in Marlborough. In 1975, the grape variety first took root in the alluvial soils of the Wairau Valley alongside a fruit salad of other vines, from hybrids like Baco 22A to Vitis vinifera that are now considered laughably unsuitable for this cool region at the top of New Zealand’s South Island. Inevitably, many varieties didn’t make the grade or didn’t survive at all. Half a century later, there are vines here as far as the eye can see, from the mountains to the sea, lines of green covering the valley floor, creeping upwards and sprawling into what remaining unplanted land there is.

Marlborough’s vineyards are increasingly heading up the hillsides, away from the valley floor.

There are some who openly wonder whether New Zealand should align itself more closely with Chardonnay, which some view as a finer partner to the country’s main red variety, Pinot Noir. New Zealand has built a loyal following for its Sauvignon Blanc, providing a launch pad for wineries, retailers and buyers to further exploration of the wines from the bottom of the earth, but Sauvignon Blanc does not have the allure of Chardonnay or Riesling to fine wine lovers. I receive plenty of pitying expressions when I reveal to these oenophiles the number of Sauvignon Blancs I taste each year.  An undeniable snobbery exists towards this grape that is capable of finesse, restraint and evolution. Even its makers in the Loire don’t like to talk about Sauvignon Blanc because they claim not to like its varietal characteristics, despite spending their entire lives nurturing its vines and shaping its wines. For many, the definition of a fine wine includes ageworthiness, but does a lack thereof mean Sauvignon Blanc cannot make fine wine? Is that the view of Château Margaux toward Pavillon Blanc, or Anne Vatan to Clos la Néore? Hardly.

Inevitably, there are two very different ends of the New Zealand white wine market, as there are in most wine regions. Firstly, there are the traders, cropping vines with four canes and exhausting the soil to make light, bright, bulk Sauvignon Blanc to be piled high and sold in supermarkets. While they account for a hefty chunk of the production volume, there are plenty of smaller wineries that have the ambition to make wines not just with fruit, but also savory complexity, with the long-term goal of passing on a living, healthy ecosystem to the next generation—and the one beyond.

In the vineyards, there’s much discussion about improving soil health by moving away from traditional herbicides and fertilizers and toward under-vine weeding, cover crops and organic fertilizer. The term “regenerative agriculture” now peppers conversations with growers and producers, whereas a year ago, it was rarely mentioned. It is not just the small-scale producers making the commitment to better farming practices; Cloudy Bay is aiming for 500 hectares of its own vineyard to be herbicide-free this year and fully organic by 2030. Similarly, Craggy Range, whose plantings span 335 hectares across Martinborough and Hawke’s Bay, has also pledged to farm its entire vineyard area organically by 2030.

Craggy Range is growing its plantings on Te Muna Road in Martinborough and moving toward organic farming.

While the future health of New Zealand’s vineyards is under scrutiny, the future of its bottled wines is also a hot topic. With regard to ageworthiness, there must be some consideration of bottle closures. Screwcaps are ubiquitous in New Zealand, sealing more than 90% of the country’s wines. Fed up with an increasing amount of subpar corks ruining wines in the 1990s, the New Zealand Screwcap Wine Seal Initiative was formed in 2001 with 32 winery members. Since then, screwcaps have proliferated in the country. Is this the end of the cork story for New Zealand? Not necessarily. At the end of 2024, UK fine wine merchant Farr Vintners hosted a blind tasting of the same wines under both screwcap and cork, including two New Zealand producers—Kumeu River and Felton Road—as well as an extensive collection of wines from Burgundy’s Domaine Verget, which switched from natural cork to DIAM technical closure in 2012. While the 2002 Kumeu River wines under screwcap were certainly outliving and outshining those oxidizing under natural cork, there were no definitive conclusions to be drawn. Tasters disagreed. Results were varied.

This was certainly not a tasting that would hold up in a scientific journal. Some wines sealed under screwcaps sported more permeable liners than others, and some corks were natural while others were DIAM of varying specifications (winemakers can choose products assuring two-, three-, five-, 10- or 30-year preservation durations.)  What’s more, some screwcaps appeared to be showing similar or occasionally even more evolution than their cork-sealed counterparts, which could have been due to the use of non-impermeable liners within the screwcap. For example, Verget switched to an impermeable liner within the screwcap from 2015 onwards, and the 2015 Pouilly Fuissé La Roche was unevolved compared with its cork counterpart.