What is Fume Blanc?
Fume Blanc is a quality white wine made from the Sauvignon Blanc grape in California. It began as the brainchild of renowned winemaker Robert Mondavi, as a way of circumventing the negative image held by the Sauvignon Blanc grape in California at the time. Before the 1970s, Sauvignon Blanc in the United States was a grape given little consideration by most winemakers, and therefore resulted in poor wines that came to be regarded with disdain by consumers. Virtually all Sauvignon Blanc of this era was overly sweet and lacked much texture or nuance. In the late 1960s, however, Robert Mondavi received a particularly fine batch of Sauvignon Blanc grapes and decided to attempt to turn them into a wine reaching towards the style of the great Loire Valley Sauvignon Blanc wines. Mondavi was particularly inspired by a Pouilly-Fume wine he had tasted from the Loire Valley, and as he was looking for a way to differentiate his Sauvignon Blanc from the sweet low-grade wines of the time, he chose th
