Graham Norton’s wine a winner

Did you know one in every 10 bottles of New Zealand wine sold on the Irish market is now a Graham Norton wine from Invivo winemakers?

Graham’s Sauvignon Blanc was awarded a Gold medal recently by the Drinks Business at the Global Sauvignon Masters. This is the 10^th Gold medal Graham Norton’s wines have won and the 50^th accolade in total since the launch of his wine.

The Global Sauvignon Masters is judged by grape variety rather than country.

Every wine is measured on the skill of the winemaker and all Global Masters are judged blind by a panel made up of Masters of Wine, Master Sommeliers and senior buyers.

The grape with “rock star” credentials these days, must surely be Sauvignon Blanc.  It even has its own day, May 4th, (which may have run into a battle with a few Star Wars fans, but as the date rotates on an annual basis we don’t think they’ll be too upset if the wine world also used it this year to celebrate the 9th Annual Sauvignon Blanc Day).

Invivo became New Zealand’s first equity-crowdfunded winery in 2008, collected a bunch of gongs including World’s Best Sauvignon Blanc and in 2016 moved into one of New Zealand’s oldest wineries where it continues to turn the world’s best grapes into New Zealand wine that’s picking up fans from Cork to New York, states the company.

In 2014 it launched the first sell-out vintage of Graham Norton’s Own Sauvignon Blanc here and in 2015 the Sauvignon won the most successful consumer launch award in Ireland.

Today Graham’s wines sell in eight countries and since its launch in Ireland in 2014 417,000 cases or five million bottles of Graham Norton’s wine have been produced. To celebrate, the team at Invivo bottled a Methuselah of the stuff. The company hopes to sell 250,000 cases or three million bottles of Graham’s wines in 2018.