2025 Dog Point Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc Marlborough 750 ml

To put Dog Point’s 94-point score from James Suckling into perspective: “Impressive handmade wine” is how he described it—and yet the price is reasonable. It’s a wine made from organically farmed estate vineyards, using 100% indigenous yeasts, with nothing added and nothing rushed. That Suckling calls it impressive is an understatement.

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 how they manage this level of craft at this price-point.

Start with the vineyards: The 2025 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 plenty of concentration and intensity, and the winemaking team uses 100% indigenous 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.