Note: Several of these pictures were lifted straight from Captûre winemaker Sam Teakle’s Instagram, which is a great IG follow.

It happens to the best of us: you think you don’t like X, and then you have an X, and it’s really good, and you kick yourself for being close minded. I didn’t like mushrooms growing up, but something happened in college (not what you’re thinking) and I turned the corner. I’m sure everyone has a story like that. For years, I hated sauvignon blanc unless it was blended with semillon and aged in oak for a bit. Then, in 2017, I got to try Ehlers Estate’s sauvignon blanc from Napa and, poof, epiphany moment. Eat crow, Menenberg.

Since then, I’ve been more open to sauvignon blanc, which is to say, I’ve tried many more, and been disappointed a great many times. I’ve had a few compelling ones from Sancerre, but the next great sauvignon blanc came by way of the New Zealand project Loveblock by Erica and Kim Crawford. This was the sauvignon blanc that captured (no pun intended) me intellectually: it was tremendously interesting and very tasty. It represents a new, exciting and wholly welcomed rendition of New Zealand sauvignon blanc after an overwhelming wave of green and lean stuff from the Kiwis. Eat crow, Menenberg.

A Captûre vineyard

That said, the best sauvignon blanc I’ve had to date is an even more recent revelation to me: the 2017 Captûre Wines Sauvignon Blanc Tradition. Captûre was founded in 2008 in California’s Mayacamus Mountains, and includes some of the most remote and high-elevation vineyards in California. In 2015, Australian Sam Teakle took over winemaking responsibilities. Earlier this year, Kayce and I had the chance to have dinner with Sam and taste his wines along with our friend Ryan O’Hara of The Fermented Fruit.

Sam came in to dinner star struck over a recent chance encounter with the Australian womens hockey team. Though it took a glass or two of wine, and many laughs, to move on from this airport run-in to politics to a good number of other entertaining conversations, we eventually and reluctantly got down to wine business. We talked tannins, Napa viniculture, oak programs and a good number of other items.

We tasted one of his sauvignon blancs, but quickly moved on to the stellar red blends and cabernets, which use fruit from high elevation and often steep vineyards and are made with traditional winemaking methods and a light touch. I found them to be elegant and refined and are wines I’d be happy to have in my cellar for a decade or two. Sam had a good deal to say about them, but when he asked me at the end if I wanted to revisit any of them, I found myself wanting to go back to the sauvignon blanc. Eat crow, Menenberg.

Captûre’s Tradition sauvignon blanc, like the Loveblock I had tasted a few months earlier, offered more substance, weight and depth than I had been accustomed to finding in the variety. I had always thought of sauvignon blanc as a lean, citrusy and acidicly- sharp wine that was simple and even sometimes unpleasantly bitter. The Captûre Tradition proves all this wrong – it proves the haters wrong – at an incredibly reasonable price of $25. It will over-deliver as a pop-and-pour summer white wine, and sufficient seriousness and complexity to be decanted for an hour and enjoyed over the course of an evening. Try this wine for an incredibly refreshing AND substantive white wine.

Picture Credit: wine-searcher.com

Tasting note: This has a wonderful, rich nose of pineapple, green apples, flint shavings, green mango and green pepper corns. It’s full bodied for a sauvignon blanc, with precise and slightly gritty acid that plumps up the juiciness of the fruit, which comes by way of apricot, lemon curd, sweet mango and just a slight kick of blood orange. It maintains great salinity to balance the sweet fruit, and finishes with wet slate, marjoram and white pepper. The mouthfeel on this is spectacular, with a round plumpness and lean, slightly twitchy acid finding harmony with each other. A very impressive wine. 94 points. Value: A+.

Where to buy

The most obvious place to get this wine is direct from the winery itself, which ships. The current vintage available on the website is the 2018. The 2017 can still be found at a few places courtesy of wine-searcher.com.

Berkley, CA: Solano Cellars

Minneapolis area, MN: Ace Wine, Spirits & Beer

Nationally: Wine.com

You can find the 2016, which I’m sure is still singing beautifully, here:

Los Angeles, CA: Mission Wine & Spirits

Chester, NJ: Shop-Rite

Clark, NJ: Wine Anthology

Metuchen, NJ: Wine Chateau

Bronx, NY: Skyview Wine & Spirits

New York, NY: Sherry-Lehmann