An Australian founder, a young winemaker and a bay named by Cook.

Cloudy Bay was founded in 1985 in Marlborough, at the north-eastern tip of New Zealand’s South Island, by David Hohnen, the Australian who had already founded Cape Mentelle in Margaret River, Western Australia. English Wikipedia says the winery takes its name from the stretch of coast that James Cook named Cloudy Bay on his voyage of 1770. The winery stands in the Wairau Valley, about eight kilometres north-west of Blenheim.

Hohnen hired a young winemaker, Kevin Judd, to run production from the start, and the first Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc was the 1985 vintage. Its reception abroad became part of New Zealand wine’s own story. The Economist reported in 1999 that the British wine writer Oz Clarke, reviewing Cloudy Bay’s first vintages in the 1980s, called New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc arguably the best in the world. The American writer George Taber, in his 2005 book Judgment of Paris, described Cloudy Bay as what many people consider the world’s best Sauvignon Blanc, and The Oxford Companion to Wine (2015) credits the winery with helping to establish New Zealand’s reputation for white wine.

The house style widened over the following years. The traditional-method sparkling wine Pelorus had its first harvest in 1987 and its first release in 1992, according to the company’s history and Decanter. Te Koko, a Sauvignon Blanc fermented with wild yeasts and aged in barrel, was first made in 1996 and first released in 2000, Decanter and the company say, setting a richer style beside the original unoaked, fruit-led wine. Judd made Cloudy Bay’s wines for 25 vintages; Decanter reported in 2009 that he would leave after that harvest and stay on as a consulting winemaker, with estate director Ian Morden taking charge. Judd went on to found his own label, Greywacke.

A mountain range drawn on the label, then pressed into the glass.

The identity rests on one view. The Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc label shows the outline of the Richmond Range, the hills seen from the winery looking towards Mount Riley, set in grey on a pale ground, and that outline has been part of the label since the first vintage, the Cyprus Mail has reported. Hohnen told The Drinks Business in 2025 that the idea came to him when he saw the Richmond Range and Mount Riley from the window of a small plane.

The range moved from paper into glass with the 2022 vintage. The New Zealand magazine The Denizen reported in October 2022 that the new bottle carried the Richmond Ranges embossed into semi-frosted glass, with a simpler and more modern label printed on paper with a canvas-like feel. It quoted Yang Shen, the estate director, as saying the winery wanted to further embrace the Richmond Ranges that can be seen from the winery. The magazine did not name a designer, so none is named here.

The range was marked again at the winery’s 40th anniversary. The 2024 Sauvignon Blanc, released in 2025 as Cloudy Bay’s 40th vintage, carried a special commemorative label on every bottle sold worldwide, Decanter reported in a sponsored feature; the Japanese magazine Openers described gold lettering reading “40th Vintage.”

The brand’s typography has its own short guide on this site: What font does Cloudy Bay use?

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Australian and New Zealand wine names: Wolf Blass, Lindeman’s, Hardys, Banrock Station, Oyster Bay, Cloudy Bay and Kim Crawford. Wine brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a restaurant list.

A wine brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its wine is actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its wine is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a Champagne house’s stake to a Moët Hennessy estate.

The ownership of Cloudy Bay changed in two steps. The Champagne house Veuve Clicquot took a stake in the winery in 1990, Decanter’s timeline of the company records, and one account of the period dates its majority stake in Cloudy Bay and Cape Mentelle to 1991, with the Hohnen family keeping a minority. In 2003, Wine Spectator reported, David Hohnen sold his remaining shares to Veuve Clicquot, giving the group full ownership. Veuve Clicquot is itself part of LVMH, and Cloudy Bay is now managed within its wine and spirits arm, Moët Hennessy. The paths of the two wineries Hohnen founded later parted: Cape Mentelle was sold to the Australian group Endeavour, which announced the agreement in January 2023, while Cloudy Bay stayed with LVMH.

The estate has grown beyond Marlborough. In 2014 Cloudy Bay bought the Northburn Station vineyards and cellar door in Central Otago, its first expansion outside its home region, the Marlborough Express reported in April that year. Its Central Otago Pinot Noir, Te Wahi, comes from there, and the winery now runs cellar doors in both regions. Sauvignon Blanc still makes up most of what it produces, English Wikipedia says, alongside Te Koko, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and the Pelorus sparkling wines.

The name needs a little care online. Cloudy Bay is also the name of the bay in the Marlborough region itself and of a bay on Bruny Island in Tasmania; the winery’s own site is cloudybay.com.

For a design guide, Cloudy Bay shows how one view of a mountain range, drawn for a first label in 1985 and later pressed into the bottle itself, can stand for a winery and a region for four decades. Compare Veuve Clicquot, the Reims Champagne house that owns it, and Oyster Bay, the Marlborough brand of the Delegat family. For this guide we use range grey, cloud and slate with a light sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Cloudy Bay’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.