Over the weekend we went down to Riverside Market in Christchurch to visit Mischief Wine. The area is a lovely place to sit, and we spent the majority of our time people-watching. You can also grab food from around the market and sit down with your wine, which is pretty cool. We were super excited to finally be trying a good wine after weeks of rather mediocre wines. They gave us a free tasting of the 4 wines they have on offer at the moment. They are currently offering a Pinot Gris, Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling, and Pinot Noir. All of their wines are delicious, and I am sure we will be back very soon to give you our opinion of all of them. For today we are focusing on their Sauvignon Blanc. Everything about this wine is exactly what you want from a Sauv Blanc and more.

Price:

As we mentioned before you can try all of their wines for free initially to help you decide what it is you want to buy. The bottle itself cost us NZ$23 ( £10.92, R263.51, US$ 13.90), which is very reasonable, especially for a wine of this quality. You can also buy a glass for NZ$10( £4.75, R114.58, US$6.04). We have linked the wine HERE, in case you want to buy it, but we would definitely recommend popping down to the market itself.

Appearance:

This is a young Sauv Blanc. So as you would expect it is a pale lemon colour, though it does have an almost gold shimmer to it. This wine is so good that we forgot to take a photo of the wine in the glass itself until we had almost finished our glasses… So enjoy this photo of a rather empty glass.

Nose:

The aromas of this wine are very pronounced from the moment that you bring the glass up towards your face. You immediately get hit with wafts of tropical fruits like mango, passionfruit and guava. Alongside some slight red fruit aromas, particularly raspberries. The tasting notes that they supply you with say that there are notes of passionfruit and guava, along with some citrus. Which in our opinion was a pretty accurate description of the notes that we picked up on. The aromas really do make you excited to try the wine.

Taste:

The initial flavour profile consists of sweet mango sorbet and passionfruit soda. A few seconds after swallowing, the wine begins to mellow out and the taste of sweet lime zest rises above the tropical characteristics. Together this creates a delicious taste of summer. You are left with the flavour long after swallowing. The acidity from the wine drops and it becomes perfectly balanced, with a lingering taste of toasted hazelnuts.

The wine is very acidic to begin with but does mellow out after a while. While it does have some sweetness to it, the wine is dry with 4.5 g/L residual sugars. It is a beautifully light-bodied wine, perfect for a warm day. And with a long finish, you are getting more bang for your buck with this one.

Though we are yet to test this out. Our theory is that this wine would pair perfectly with beautifully ripe tomatoes, good-quality olive oil and balsamic vinegar. The combination of sweetness and acidity in the wine and balsamic would complement each other wonderfully, and the smoothness of this wine would blend harmoniously with the olive oil. That being said Saskia does class tomatoes as her all-time favourite food… so in her opinion anything would taste better with some tomatoes on the side.

Conclusion:

Overall everything about this wine is just wonderful, cannot fault it. It has an incredible value and you get so much for what you are paying. It is wonderfully complex without being too overpowering, which can be the case with some NZ Sauvignon blanc.

The artwork on all of their bottles, as well as the signs around the store, are beautifully designed. And let’s be honest when it comes to wine everyone judges the book by its cover.

We strongly recommend that if you have the chance, to go down to Riverside Market and have a look at what they offer. Grab a bite to eat and a bottle of whichever wine takes your fancy and watch the world go by around you, it’s pretty fun.

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Have a great week

Saskia and Didier ✌️