"The winemaker's gamble"
Marlborough is famous for white wine but generally not for Rhone Valley white grapes or wine styles. Enter Brave Roots Wine and Viognier.
As New Zealand wine brands go, this one is pretty new. Brave Roots Wine began its journey in 2023 when founders Alina Tenetka and Masha Skorchenko started making wine, releasing their first commercial wines in March 2025.
This month, the duo behind Brave Roots has released the 2025 Brave Roots Viognier, using Marlborough grapes and creating a wine that is bone dry - and, more importantly, tastes it. There's a very modest 2 grams of residual sugar, which is not detectable, except to contribute fleshy textural qualities to this wine.
Alina sees Viognier as something of a gamble, describing it as temperamental and able to show extraordinary beauty when handled with care. In Marlborough’s Awatere Valley, that gamble becomes a conversation between the site and the season. Alluvial soils offer restraint to a grape that, given half the chance, can give a little too generously of its fleshy ripe peach characters - at least in young soils and newer wine regions.
By contrast, the wind in Awatere Valley and the windier than usual 2025 vintage have both shaped this wine's textural phenolic grip, adding a sense of dryness and sharpening the wine.
Here's my review
2025 Brave Roots Viognier RRP $55
Awatere Valley is the vast, cool valley carved out of the landscape by the eponymous river. It's south of Blenheim so the climate is significantly cooler - and also windier, which reduces the volume of wine made from grapes grown here. This brings a line of bold fresh acidity to the wines which is balanced by fermentation in seasoned French oak with 10 months' ageing on lees, both working their textural magic to capture Viognier’s silky texture and spicy ripe white stone fruit aromas. The result is a full bodied, dry wine with a subtle sense of toasty richness.
There were 771 bottles made.
