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“It’s not easy being green.” So sang a triangle-mouthed frog puppet, once. Of course, at the time he had a hand jammed up his…well, anyway, I’m not sure his plight applies to us.

Still, mention “green” in the context of wine and you’ve got trouble. A rather dismaying number of people, for whom any wine that doesn’t taste like fruit pie slathered with jam is just no good, can’t stand even the slightest hint of anything green. No grass. No herbs. No vegetables. Only fruit, FRUIT, FRUIT! One assumes that, as children, they hid their veggies under a napkin, spent hours picking out every last fleck of herb from their food, and did anything they could to avoid mowing the lawn.

But green elements are an essential part of a lot of wines. The problem comes from the arbitrary notion that “green” is a synonym for “underripe,” which is usually considered a bad thing. But the definition of ripeness has gotten rather extreme of late, sometimes causing wines that don’t taste like fermented fruit syrup to be demeaned as, yes, green…and therefore underripe.

That’s a shame. Many grapes – most of them white, though not all – have greenish hues as part of their essential natures, whether they’re ripe or not. Sauvignon blanc. Sylvaner. Grüner veltliner. Sémillon. And, on the tinted side, cabernet franc and cabernet sauvignon. It’s not that it’s impossible to eliminate green notes by letting these grapes hang on the vine until they’re raisins, it’s just that this rather misses the point of growing them in the first place. If one wants their cabernet to taste like zinfandel, why not just plant zinfandel?

The disappearing tinge of green is most missed in the spring, when our food is just starting to emerge from its rich, heavy, fat-laden winter slumber. Plants – fresh ones grown somewhere closer to us than Peru – finally re-enter the food lexicon. Primavera becomes a pasta topping that can be assembled from the produce aisle, rather than frozen foods. People burst into song for absolutely no reason. (No? Not at your house?)

And it’s the time to drink sauvignon blanc. It’s the most spring-like of grapes. The core of its character is a green-tinged, grassy blend of tart citrus juices. Bell and, in some cases, chile pepper can enter the mix. When pushed to overripeness it tastes like canned tropical fruit salad, but there’s still a lingering, and welcome, green edge.

In Sancerre, a French region where sauvignon blanc reaches its peak of complexity, grassiness is joined with minerality and restraint. Some of the very best bottles – in contrast to most sauvignon – can even age (5-10 years). Producers to look for include the two Cotats and Thomas-Labaille. A short trip downriver, the Clos Roche Blanche Sauvignon “No. 2” from the Touraine is a chalkier variation on the same theme, and a screaming bargain as well.

New Zealand is the other dominant player on the sauvignon scene (they call it “savvy” and serve it by the caseload at parties), and there the wines exhibit a youthful exuberance appropriate for such a young country…a forceful, in-your-face nature that brought them to international acclaim just a few decades after most of the vines were planted. Dog Point, Isabel, Seresin, and The Crossings all excel.

From Italy’s Alto Adige, St. Michael-Eppan’s “Sanct Valentin” bottling is exquisite, bringing even more intensity to a Sancerre-like paradigm, while white Bordeaux (typically a sauvignon blanc/sémillon blend) is admirably represented at the affordable end by Graville-Lacoste. Leaping across the majority of the hemisphere, Southern Right from South Africa is as impossible to ignore as any New Zealand sauvignon, with a somewhat more angular aspect.

And how about domestic sauvignon blanc? That’s a little more difficult, since many producers still cling to an eighties trend of oaking and sweetening their sauvignon until it’s pretty much indistinguishable from chardonnay to which similar abuses have been committed. Thankfully, there are exceptions. Di Stefano from Washington’s Columbia Valley is a transitional style, halfway between the traditional and the overly-soft modern version, while Easton in the Sierra Foothills makes an especially floral example. But some of the best of all might be coming from Oregon, a state almost no one associates with the grape. J. Christopher’s two site-specific bottlings, Croft and Maresh, are extraordinary, combing the complexity and sophistication of the Old World with the exciting exuberance of the New.

Sauvignon blanc can be a zingy and refreshing drink all by itself on days when the air doesn’t provide quite enough of its own chill (you know, those warming spring afternoons…which I’m given to understand are common elsewhere, even if they’re unheard of here in Boston). But it’s better when its exuberance is tamed by food. The best marriages include green vegetables (including the ever-difficult asparagus) and anything made from them, acidic ingredients (citrus, vinegar, tomato, onion), and raw seafood. Especially when wasabi’s involved.

But is it the best match for singing frog? Shame on you for even thinking it.

(First published in stuff@night, 2008.)