Villa Maria Private Bin Sauvignon Blanc, 2004 vintage
price: $10-$12
suggested food pairings: finfish or shellfish, sautéed chicken or veal dishes

Villa Maria is among New Zealand’s top honored wineries. Located in Marlborough, they have a product line that has five different ranges, with several labels within each range. The Private Bin series is their entry-level offering and provides the consumer with exceptional value. The bottle I picked up for this week’s emptying is actually on sale for under $10 in state liquor stores through April 30.

As is becoming the norm with many New Zealand wines, this one has a screw top. I’m a big fan of the screw top. Ninety percent of the wines on the market are meant to be drunk as soon as they hit the shelf, and will not benefit from being stoppered by a cork. With cork production becoming sourced from inferior trees because of demand created by the wine boom in the last decade, lots and lots of wine has gone bad in the bottle. I’ve mentioned this before, but the numbers are still incredible—when I started working with wine over 20 years ago, our 300-plate a night steakhouse came across maybe one bad bottle of wine per month. Nowadays, it’s common for busy places to come across one or two on a single busy night! I’d rather give up the romance of the corkscrew than throw away wine any day. Save the corks—good corks—for the expensive stuff, and give us the freshness and convenience of the screw top for our everyday wines.

This wine has always been a true-to-New Zealand example of Sauvignon Blanc, but I found this vintage a little fuller than past bottlings. Still crisp and racy like you’d expect, the 2004 has a backdrop of creamy tropical fruit that adds welcome weight to the flavor profile. Pale clear yellow, the nose gives up a citrus grassiness so typical of New Zealand’s Sauvignon Blancs. Those aromas become flavors as they marry themselves to an acid that makes the tongue sweat with delight. Amidst all of this activity is a mango- textured fruit aspect that lends an extra component of complexity. There is a lot happening here for so little money.

Craig Pierce can be reached at craig_l_pierce[at]hotmail[dot]com