Fume Blanc is a quality white wine made from the Sauvignon Blanc grape in California. It began as the brainchild of renowned winemaker Robert Mondavi, as a way of circumventing the negative image held by this variety of grape at the time.
Before the 1970s, Sauvignon Blanc was given little consideration by most US winemakers, and therefore resulted in poor wines that came to be regarded with disdain by consumers. Virtually all wine of this variety at the time was overly sweet and lacked much texture or nuance. In the late 1960s, however, Robert Mondavi received a particularly fine batch of grapes and decided to attempt to turn them into a wine reaching towards the style of the great Loire Valley wines. Mondavi was particularly inspired by a Pouilly-Fume wine he had tasted from the Loire Valley, and as he was looking for a way to differentiate his Sauvignon Blanc from the sweet low-grade wines of the time, he chose a new name.