Cloudy Bay winemaker introduces 2025 release on the ‘citrus spectrum’
After a “very interesting year” in the vineyard, Cloudy Bay winemaker Kelly Stuart talks Sauvignon Blanc with db, addressing the winery’s unusual market position and explaining the vintage’s character.
The first time Kelly Stuart tasted Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc was not a transformative experience. There was no prophetic mark of destiny, prefiguring her joining the winery in 2016 and being promoted to winemaker in 2023. In fact, it was quite ordinary.
“I think at university, we probably would have had it in a tasting,” she explains. “I probably didn’t recognise the significance of it at the time because I was a 19-year-old student and could have been at the pub the night before.”
It is in keeping with Stuart’s persona. Easygoing and unpretentious, she seems to have remained grounded in her time at Cloudy Bay. There is no hyperbole as she tastes the wines; if anything, she approaches them with modest understatement. Her summary of the Cloudy Bay 2022, for instance, reads: “It’s just a really good wine.”
Yet her first brush with Cloudy Bay also speaks to the winery’s peculiar position in the world of premium wines. It is undeniably known for its quality, but is also widely available in supermarkets. Unlike, say the lofty world of premier cru Burgundy, neither scarcity nor price marks the cuvée out. This is premium wine your next-door neighbour might have heard of.
So is it tough to make the case for premium wine when you diverge from many of the sector’s archetypes? Though Stuart admits the situation is different, she is content with the wine’s position.
“We would love to have the prestige of Sancerre,” she says, “but we’re not trying to mimic any other region. We’re not trying to replicate something.” She believes that Marlborough has its own style, bound up in characteristic aromas and thiols, unlike anywhere else in the world. The winery’s benchmark Sauvignon Blanc, she says, is a wine that “punches you in the face with aromas”.
Of course, lacking centuries of prestige has its advantages too. “That’s the beauty of New Zealand: you don’t have to spend a fortune to get a really beautiful wine.”
One area that is often neglected for the New Zealand stalwart, however, is its vintage variation. While immensely complex charts are routinely shared for Burgundy and Bordeaux, analysis of the Marlborough season is less commonplace. It is no less important, a point Stuart demonstrated through her in-depth analysis of the wines’ conditions. Certainly, for a premium offering, it needs careful consideration.
How is the 2025 release?
Stuart came to London to present the entire Cloudy Bay range, but the Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc 2025 is particularly noteworthy as it is fresh to market.
So what is the headline story? After a warmer season for the 2024 vintage, the newly released wine shows the impact of a cooler year.
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“It’s more that lemon-lime citrus spectrum coming through in the wines,” she says, drawing a distinction with some of Marlborough’s hotter years that lean towards passionfruit and guava. The wines are also showing themselves as “a bit more herbal” than in previous years.
That profile is the result of a “very interesting year” in the vineyards. After a very good spring and an unseasonably warm December, the weather “turned the air con on” until February.
That initial warmth really helped with the grapes’ early development: excellent flowering meant huge bunches on the vine. To hit the yields necessary for the Cloudy Bay style, the vineyard team had to take the unusual step of cutting entire canes off the plants.
Yet, even for the bunches that remained, the spring has made a mark on the wine. With such large bunches, the inner grapes received far less sunlight. They therefore contributed those positive herbal aromas – box hedge and sugar snap peas, to my palate – to the final blend.
The cooler summer temperatures, meanwhile, were responsible for that citrus character. The wine, certainly, is towards the leaner end of Cloudy Bay’s production.
Lean, however, does not equal mean. Although the first grapes were picked early on 17 March, Stuart and her team put on the brakes for most of the crop. The harvest continued until 2 April, hitting optimum ripeness while the weather held. It was, in a sense, perfect timing: Stuart reckons the last parcel arrived 10 minutes before the autumn’s first major rain event hit.
As a winemaker, the harvest suited her well. Without a rush to bring in the grapes, both the winery and vineyard teams could take their time, focusing on quality.
Certainly, the year is not a textbook vintage, but it evidently laid the foundation for a distinctive character. Moreover, unlike many older regions, climate change is not yet ringing alarm bells for Cloudy Bay’s vineyard teams.
“We’re still getting the ups and downs that are typical of Marlborough weather. They might be getting more extreme – more warmer, more cooler, a bit more rain than normal – but it’s certainly nothing to be afraid of,” Stuart comments. “It’s still gradual enough in the changes that we can adapt, learn and see patterns.”
That is surely good news for both fine wine lovers and next-door neighbours. Every year brings its changes and a certain unique character, yet the Cloudy Bay style is safe for years to come.
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