Jim White: ‘2017 the toughest vintage of my life’

The incessant rains during harvest time in Marlborough has led winemaker Jim White of Cloudy Bay to say the 2017 vintage was the toughest vintage in his life so far.

Jim White of Cloudy Bay in Hong Kong at the launch party for Cloudy Bay’s 2017 vintage

Speaking to dbHK at the 2017 launch of Cloudy Bay in Hong Kong, the winemaker revealed that the two cyclones in April, only seven days apart, had adversely affected harvests in Marlborough region, causing the winery to reduce its production for the vintage.

“We had two cyclones come through, the first did not drop too much rain, and the second one came along around mid April, and basically we did not pick anything after the second rain storm. We managed to get 90% of grapes into the winery, and lost 10%,” White explained.

“[I’ve worked] 21 vintages and it was my toughest,” he confessed. “There has been a lot of angst and worries. It’s my toughest vintage in viticulture, and I worked in Yarra Valley for 10 to 11 years and after that in Margaret River.”

Usually, Sauvignon Blanc is picked in mid-April or the last week of April at Cloudy Bay, the last to be picked after Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. This year, the grape was not fully ripe when the first cyclone hit, the winemaker said, “so a lot of the grapes had to sit through it”.

“The first one [cyclone] dropped about 30ml of rain, we basically stopped harvesting for 24 hours, then went back to the vineyards when things dried out. We tasted the grapes, and it was great, so we got on with it, especially when there was the potential of a second one coming. What do they say that a bird in hand is better than two in the bush? And we had flavour ripeness,” he elaborated.

Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc 2017

It was a vintage, he continued, that required the team to make “strategic decisions”.

The 2017 vintage was launched globally in the first week of October, and so far based on the reviews, White said, “We haven’t had one person who liked 2016 better than 2017”, adding there is still “a lot of concentration and structure to it”.

Asked about this year’s Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, White said the Chardonnay is “fantastic”, while the Pinot Noir, which is still going through malolactic fermentation at this stage, will be better assessed during the blending period.

“It was tricky. We got some good batches and some bad batches. We picked it a bit earlier than we’d like to do. But if we left it for too long there would have been no grapes left out after the second rain,” he said.