From its very first vintage, which won gold and the coveted Marquis de Goulaine Trophy for 'Best Sauvignon Blanc of the Competition' at the 22nd International Wine & Spirit Competition in London in 1991, Oyster Bay has continued to define the very stature and style of New Zealand wines.

Described more recently by leading London wine writer, Giles Kime, as "pretty close to being the elusive stuff of dreams", Oyster Bay takes its name from the local 'Oyster Bay' on the tip of New Zealand's majestic South Island. Oyster Bay's reputation has been built from vines grown in Marlborough's central Wairau Valley now recognised as one of the great wine growing regions of the world. With its cool, sunny, maritime climate and its shallow, stony soils etched across great alluvial plains by ancient glaciers, Marlborough is described in Oz Clarke's Wine Atlas as ".one of the greatest places on earth to grow vines, producing some of the world's most remarkable wines."

Small wonder Oyster Bay has consistently won so many of the world's most-prestigious wine awards and the hearts of so many wine lovers from Sydney to Seattle, London to New York.

Internationally-recognised for producing "elegant, assertive wines with glorious fruit flavours", Oyster Bay is also a winemaker with great viticultural vision. It was Oyster Bay that had the foresight, over two decades ago, to recognise the enormous wine-growing potential that lay beneath the stony, alluvial soils of a marginal sheep farming district in New Zealand's Hawkes Bay. Today that region is producing New Zealand's finest merlots.

Not surprisingly, one of the most exciting of these is Oyster Bay's own Hawkes Bay Merlot, already being hailed as a worthy complement to a range of chardonnays, sauvignon blancs and pinot noirs that proudly carry the name - and growing international reputation - of Oyster Bay.