2015 Sauvignon Blanc

Brian Bicknell, who was responsible for making the wines for Seresin Estate from 1996 through 2006, began his own Mahi venture in 2001. From the beginning, all of his wines were from single sites; as he explains it, “I wanted to show that Marlborough isn’t just one big-ass vineyard.” Bicknell purchased his winery outside Renwick in 2006; it came with vineyards that he had previously leased.

Bicknell’s overall objective with his white wines is “to get the juice away from the skins.” He works entirely with free-run juice ("lots of people here use some press wine to add texture and palate presence, and to raise the pH"), looking for a subtle front-of-palate, a seamless middle and a long, elegant finish. “We don’t look for a lot of upfront fruit, so our wines are subtler and better with food.” He only moves his wines twice (he refers to this process as "machine to bin") so he is able to get “close to hand-picked quality” even from the four of his seven vineyards that he harvests by machine.

Bicknell, whose website offers a very instructive “virtual vineyard flyover” of his fruit sources in Marlborough, describes vineyards in the southern part of the region as drier and those in the west as cooler. Parcels in the eastern part of the region, closer to the ocean, yield more tropical, opulent wines from soils richer in clay, while those farther to the west produce more brisk, grapefruity wines. Bicknell noted that it's considerably more expensive to farm hillside vines but he appreciates the complexity of hillside soils based on silt and clay. The flat lands, he says, “give more aromatic wines but not as much texture.” Production at Mahi is about 18,000 cases per year, of which 90% is exported.