Here in Florida, summer dinners almost always call for white wine. I have my loyalties to pinot noir and cabernet sauvignon, but with fish—and there is a great deal of fish—something lighter and crisper is better suited.

My friends are less convinced. They sit with their white wine and wait, really, for a red. The problem is that for them, white wine is chardonnay, full stop. Gruner veltliner, albarino, vermentino, grillo, riesling—these might as well not exist. It’s a loss they don’t even know they’re suffering.

I try sauvignon blanc first, thinking it a safer bridge. It isn’t. My friends divide over it almost as fiercely something far more challenging. New Zealand or California?, I ask. The question produces the same blank stalemate as asking a room to agree on who should win the FIFA World’s Cup soccer game.

France is where the grape begins. The Loire Valley has the oldest paper trail, dating to 1534, and Sancerre remains its most celebrated expression—taut, mineral, coolly aromatic. Pouilly-Fumé, its near neighbor, carries a faint smokiness. Bordeaux developed its own tradition in the Graves, where sauvignon blanc is typically softened by sémillon into something altogether more generous and less angular than what the Loire produces.

These two regions still anchor the grape’s identity, but New Zealand is what many people mean when they reach for a bottle. Marlborough’s sauvignon blanc is a product of extremes: fierce sun that toughens the grape’s skin, cold nights that slow its ripening, and the resulting chemistry—pyrazines, mostly—that drives the wine’s aggressive grapefruit, grassy and green herb character. Think bell peppers and jalapenos. Some find it thrilling. Others find it exhausting.

Robert Mondavi is largely responsible for California’s version having any dignity at all. He took a grape that had been made into something sweet and forgettable, aged it in oak, and renamed it fumé blanc. Napa Valley still leans into that richer, tropical register. Sonoma and Monterey, usally working without oak, tend toward something leaner and more acidic, with stone fruit rather than the tropics.

Sauvignon blanc is one of the few categories where sales are merely softening rather than collapsing. Silver Oak, whose entire identity is cabernet, released one this year.

Here are a few sauvignon blancs that demonstrate their differences:

Loire. I love the wines from Didier Dagueneau ever since I visited him decades ago, but these wines are well beyond my budget today. On the other hand, consider Domaine Patrick Vauvy in Touraine or Domaine de L’Estang.

Graves. I have enjoyed cases of Chateua Ducasse over the years and also like Chateau Graville-Lacoste. Both are blended with semillon to give the region’s wines a softer appeal.

California. Robert Mondavi’s estate fume blanc is still an excellent example of Napa Valley sauvignon blanc. I also love the sauvignon blancs from Gamble, Spottswoode, Davis in Napa Valley and Alma de Cattleya and Mantanzas Creek in Sonoma County.

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