2024 Dog Point Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc Marlborough 750 ml

To put Dog Point’s 95-point score from Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate into perspective: Fewer than 200 Sauvignon Blancs have reached these heights in the entire history of the publication. The vast majority of those stratospheric scores have been from the high-dollar names you’d expect: Screaming Eagle, Lail, Eisele, and others on that level.

The mystery isn’t how Dog Point is able to make such excellent Sauvignon Blanc—their production methods are practically a checklist for top-quality wines—but it's how they manage this level of craft at this price-point.

Start with the vineyards: The 2024 Sauvignon Blanc comes from eight different sites around the Wairau Valley, in Marlborough. Wairau is arguably the most prestigious area in all of New Zealand for growing Sauvignon Blanc. It’s the home of Cloudy Bay, the wine that put the country on the world’s wine map, and is notable for its soaring aromatics, thanks to a mild maritime climate and well-draining soils.

Each of those eight vineyards is owned by Dog Point, and they’ve been farmed organically for over 15 years. Yields are kept low to ensure that there’s plenty of concentration and intensity to the wine, and the winemaking team uses a mixture of native and cultured yeasts to build complexity and nuance. 

Aged in stainless steel to preserve purity and freshness, Dog Point produces a model of excellence for the genre—a bottling that stands with the very best in the region. As for the price? We still don’t quite know how they do it, but we know that we never want to miss it.