No wine style has gone from nonexistent to world benchmark faster. Montana planted Marlborough's first commercial vines in 1973, at the top of New Zealand's South Island; Cloudy Bay's 1985 debut gave the style its icon; and by the 2000s "Savvy" was a global category of its own, imitated on every continent.
The recipe is climatic: long sunny days and cold nights on the free-draining gravels of the Wairau valley pile up ripeness and acidity together, yielding thiols that read as passionfruit and gooseberry over cut-grass pyrazines. Screwcaps, adopted early and almost universally, sealed that brightness in. It is wine as a clear, ringing chord — recognisable from a metre away.