Sauvignon blanc

Banzai88 · Nov 12, 2017

Quick question. I am about to move up from small batch to full batch kits and looking for advice. To reward my wife for her patience with my new hobby I would like to start with her favorite wine, sauvignon blanc. She particularly likes wine from Marlborough, NZ. Any suggestions on best supplier? Any tips would also be greatly appreciated.

Boatboy24 · Nov 12, 2017

Go with the Eclipse SB. It is very good simply following the directions. Though some will tweak with some grapefruit zest or a little tartaric acid to bump up the 'zing'.

Stressbaby · Nov 12, 2017

My wife's favorite is also NZ Sauv Blanc. I don't do many kits, but there is an Eclipse NZ SB which I tried a couple of years ago and it was disappointing. I seem to be a little sensitive to KT, but also it came up short on those thiol/passion fruit aromas the NZ Sauv Blanc is known for. If you try it and have good success please let us know. If you do it I would sub QA 23 for whatever yeast they send.

Banzai88 · Nov 12, 2017

Thanks for the suggestions. I love the idea of adding grapefruit zest, I would have never thought of that.

Elizajean · Nov 12, 2017

Stressbaby said:
My wife's favorite is also NZ Sauv Blanc. I don't do many kits, but there is an Eclipse NZ SB which I tried a couple of years ago and it was disappointing. I seem to be a little sensitive to KT, but also it came up short on those thiol/passion fruit aromas the NZ Sauv Blanc is known for. If you try it and have good success please let us know. If you do it I would sub QA 23 for whatever yeast they send.

KT?
I have one bulk aging, not sure how it will turn out. I did use the 23, it came with the kit.

Stressbaby · Nov 12, 2017

Good to hear; I'm pretty sure when I made it a couple of years ago they sent EC-1118, but I didn't take notes on that.

I also tweaked mine with some grapefruit zest and it did help. If you have any access to fresh passion fruit, the other tweak you could make is to do a secondary infusion with the passion fruit pulp. I didn't do this on the Eclipse NZ SB kit but I've done it with other wines. Scoop out the pulp from the passion fruit and put it into a small cheese cloth bag and drop it in the carboy. I've left it up to 4 weeks, then rack. Do it prior to clearing on the off chance it clouds the wine at all. And if you don't want to try this on the entire batch you could rack the 6 to a 5 + 1 and just treat the 1 gallon portion as a test.