Judging wines blind, first thing in the morning when your palate is at its perkiest and with not only the labels but also the bottles masked so that there are no clues as to their contents, is the best test of their character. Wines without nomenclature have nowhere to hide, no grand pedigrees to sway your opinion, and faults loom large. Any bottles that pass muster at this hour of the day I have always found taste delicious in the evening with food. So I was horrified last month at the Decanter World Wine Awards, judging a whole slew of supposedly top-notch £7-£9.99 South Island New Zealand Marlborough sauvignons, to discover that most of them were evil, watery, grassy wines.

The top drops among them did have the herbaceous, flowering currant and tropical fruit characters that have made this classic New World appellation a global crowd-pleaser ever since Cloudy Bay’s moody, misty label and zingy sauvignon blanc within pushed this wine style into the finest and rarest cult class in the mid-1980s. But there were none at this Decanter competition to which I personally wanted to award even a bronze medal and none that I would have paid £7 to taste again.

A leading Australian oenologist afterwards told me that his take was that the detrimentally high yields the Kiwis are now squeezing out of their sauvignon blanc grapes are taking their toll. The bumper, record-breaking 2008 New Zealand sauvignon blanc harvest has helped quantity, not quality, with this grape accounting for a third of the vineyards planted but nearly two thirds of the crop.

Any of you still keen on buying Marlborough sauvignons, when there is plenty of decent Gallic sauvignon to be had for about £6, should take care to follow specific recommendations. My hot tip £4.99 Kiwi sauvignon, which is easily worth £3 more, is the elegant, verdant, floral, gooseberry-charged 2008 Marlborough Hills Sauvignon Blanc from Majestic Wine (£4.99 a throw if you buy two or more, or £6.24 a bottle). But get cracking: there are only 3,000 cases available. The Co-op’s reply is the 2008 Explorer’s Vineyard Sauvignon, £7.49 of herby, verdant fruit. Just £1 more brings you the intense, asparagus-suitable, peapod, green bean and green tomato-spiked 2008 Tawhiri Sauvignon, £7.99, both from Marlborough. At Tesco your best Marlborough bet is the top winery Vavasour’s 2008 The Reach Sauvignon Blanc (£8.19), whose gentle, ripe, floral fruit will suit those who find sauvignon just too darned sparky for their taste.

This week’s best buys:

2007 Domaine Begude Chardonnay, Limoux, France Waitrose, down to £5.99 until tomorrow. Snap up this lively baked spiced apple of a southern French white. Fermented and aged in oak, hence its cinnamon scents.

2008 Recchia Bardolino, Veneto, Italy Waitrose, down to £4.79 until tomorrow. A perfect warm-weather red with lots of joyous, ripe, redcurranty fruit that is just the ticket with vitello tonnato or garlicky charcuterie.

2006 Meursault, Jean Bourguignon, France Majestic, £17.99, or buy two for £14.99 each. Majestic’s burgundy buyer’s latest find is Bourguignon’s delicious, rich, creamy, nutty meursault from a top white Burgundy vintage.

2006 Nuits-Saint- Georges, Jean Bourguignon, France Majestic Wine, £17.99 or buy two for £14.99 each. The year 2006 was almost as grand for reds as it was for whites; this fat, rich, spicy, gamey red is a tour de force.

The keeper:

2001 Château de Laussac, Côtes de Castillon, Bordeaux, France Montrachet (020-7928 1990) £14.50 Alain Raynaud and his family are responsible for this right-bank satellite charmer from a fine vintage. With so much elegant, floral, spicy, leafy claret finesse, it would be easy to underestimate but there is sufficient grip and backbone here to take this fine claret through to 2015.

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