Jun 20 2012

The Great Tinhorn Surprise

Category: Wine tasting — winepost @ 4:29 am

20120619-212941.jpgOk, let me just start out by stating a couple of things:

1 – Merlot, on it’s own, from anywhere in the world, has never really excited me.
2 – I tend to avoid wines with a high stated alcohol by volume (ABV). I drink wine with food and my food doesn’t really like highly alcoholic wines.

Enter this week’s wine from Tinhorn Creek – the Merlot 2009. If my neighbours would be so kind as to take down their house, I would have a great view of this winery. (I mentioned that once about my other neighbour’s trees which blocked our southern view and then 6 months later after a wind storm, he cut them all down except one. Now we have a great view.)

Check out that ABV – 14.8% – Yikes! What was going to happen with my spicy BBQ pork steaks? I know this wine may have been slightly mismatched. But as a wine-guy and not a traditional ‘foodie’, when matching wines I try to err on the side of the wine. This means that even if the food isn’t as good as I’d hoped, the wine will still shine through above it.

The whole issue of high alcohol was put to rest with the first comment from my wife when she tasted the wine: “Wow, is this low alcohol?”

Hmmm…

20120619-212949.jpgSo here’s the deal. This wine’s stated ABV is high.

And it’s a Merlot.

But this wine is balanced – so well that the alcohol doesn’t even stick out. It’s got fruit (tons, not jammy or baked), oak (hints, very well proportioned) and acidity ( very well balanced), and the burn I was expecting from the high alcohol just wasn’t there. Just a long finish of plums, savoury spices, and cocoa. Wonderful stuff it was, and all things that I look for in a wine of any kind.

So, based on this wine, I will re-evaluate my avoidance of high alcohol wines but with some trepidation. Tinhorn Creek has been around for a while and they know how to deal with ‘challenging’ vintages and weird weather. I will likely be more willing to accept a higher alcohol wine from a vineyard of pedigree like that than a newer winery who has only been in business for a few years (i.e. less than a decade). Tinhorn Creek is more than capable of navigating these waters and with product like this humble Merlot, which retails for about $18, they can clearly walk the walk and talk the talk.

And I’ll be listening from now on.

Cheers from wine country!
~Luke

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Aug 23 2011

Focus

Category: Wine tasting — winepost @ 5:32 am

Sometimes there are wines that shine above all the others around it. Sometimes there are wines that are good but do not really stand out for whatever reason. And there are wines that stand out but not for the intended reason (faulted, or just weird tasting). This post is about the second.

A little personal history is needed here. I used to act in dinner theatre plays in the Maritimes. Someone actually paid me to act like an idiot. (And I was acting, honest.) It seemed like a dream job at the time. That was back when I had no idea what Chardonnay was and only thought that there were two kinds of wine: red and white.

As we rehearsed the shows over the two weeks leading up to opening night, we played a lot of improvisation games, similar to the games used on shows like “Who’s Line is it Anyways?” One of those games involved taking and giving focus. “Focus” is where one actor on stage takes the attention and makes the audience look at him or her. A show’s director always tries to control where the audience is looking by arranging the actors on stage in various ways for dramatic or comedic effect. Audiences will generally watch the actor who is speaking the loudest. Since our show was largely improvised, we had to be trained to control our focus on the fly and this took a lot of practice as a group.

This is one of the games that we used for exercising focus: We would all wander around randomly on the stage mumbling a story in a low voice. The director would call out a name and that person would have to take the focus by talking in a loud voice above the din of all the other people wandering around randomly on stage. The director would call another name and that person would have to take the focus while the first person would then go back to mumbling in a low voice. It seemed weird at the time and it probably looked just as weird, but as a group we became extremely aware of who had the focus and how to give it and take it. Some of us in the group were naturally better at grabbing the focus and some took the focus with a little trepidation.

I know what you’re thinking: “Come on! What does this have to do with wine? I thought you were a wine blogger. I want my 2 minutes back…”

Well, here’s the deal. I recently tried out a bottle of 8th Generation’s Merlot 2009. It was good. It had fruit. It was smooth and balanced. It had everything that Merlot is supposed to have. But it just never grabbed me and made me pay attention to it the way an actor grabs the focus on stage. I don’t expect every wine to do that, but having seen what 8th Generation has done since opening their Summerland shop in late 2007, I had expected it to be more attention-grabbing.

They first made me pay attention to them with their Rieslings. They made two versions, an off-dry Riesling and a dry Classic Riesling and both were stunning although I was more partial to the Classic. Then they released a Pinot Meunier Rosé which totally knocked me over and made me take BC rosés a little more seriously. (I still have never driven that far to a winery only to pick up 2 bottles of anything the way I did for that wine a couple of years ago.) Then they released the Frizzanté Chardonnay (and the Confidence Rosé a year later) and again my attention turned to them. They seemed to keep coming up with new wines that delivered on taste, balance, complexity, and all those things that I love about wines. Their Rieslings, Pinot Meuniers and the frizzantés were great at grabbing the focus and made me pay attention.

This merlot did not do that for me for some reason.

Perhaps it is just that merlot doesn’t stand out and take focus in BC. It seems like everyone has a merlot in BC. I can think of only a couple that have stood out and stolen the show while I can think of being blown away by many different Pinot Noirs, Syrahs, Rieslings, Gewurztraminers, and Cab Francs over the years. 8th Generation has always had my attention. Maybe it’s the varietal itself rather than the producer that just doesn’t stand out enough to grab the spotlight and sing into the microphone.

It could be that the house style at 8th Generation is not based around the big, full-bodies reds the way other wineries are. Riesling, Pinot Meunier and Frizzanté wines do not classify as big or full-bodied.

Whatever the reason, this Merlot didn’t grab me and make me pay it any attention the way that a good actor can draw the audience’s attention. It simply was. And sometimes that isn’t a bad thing.

Cheers from wine country.

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Apr 12 2010

hay bales and a daily special

Category: Wine tasting — admin @ 4:03 pm

 

Spring in the Okanagan brings many things: daffodils, fruit tree blossoms – and the occasional freakish cold snap. They usually hit mid-April, and this one came with hail / snow / rain and gale-force winds. The kind of wind that makes me think of battening down the hatches. Whatever hatches are.

After a depressingly cold spring day (those words so don’t look right together), I like to think about being sometime else – it’s being at a different time, but in the same spot. Got it? Hope so. It was on a cold spring day that I tasted wine from an Okanagan winery I hadn’t tried. Shocking, I know. Hey, I can’t drink 24/7. Although it has worked well for other writers…

There was a bottle of ’06 Reserve Merlot from Hillside Estate Winery hanging around the house, and I needed to take the chill off the day. Hello, corkscrew – meet bottle.

Snide Sideways comments aside (you know who you are), merlot does fairly well in the okanagan and Hillside definitely makes an easy drinker out of it. Take a bag of overripe cherries, sit down on a hay bale that’s baked all afternoon in the hot August sun, then open the bag of cherries and inhale. Repeat. Yeah. That’s this wine. It’s ready to drink now, so don’t wait.

Hillside is, not surprisingly, built up the actual hillside along the Naramata Bench. They’ve got a sweet little bistro-type eating spot with a killer patio that’s aching to be crammed with people laughing, drinking and doing all that fun summer stuff you do on a patio.

On the day I tried the bistro it wasn’t yet warm enough for patio action, so my friend Allison and I sat by the gigantic windows and took in what view we could from the inside – which was a lot. Then the wine came. And the food. Hell yeah.

Their new executive chef Robert Cordonier has lots of wine-bistro-y food on the menu. From duck confit to mussels, they’ve got it. I tried the daily special – always try a daily special; it’s special for a reason. Penne, sautĂ©ed mushrooms and bits of caramelized onion with just enough garlic. Pasta perfection, enjoyed with a (recommended) glass of their ’09 Muscat Ottonel. Fresh. I need to do dinner at Hillside with my fella this summer.

Oh – one more thing: I asked, and Chef Rob emailed me the how-to on making this dish. What a sweetie. Thanks.

So Allison and I sat. And ate. And chatted for over two hours. Lunching over good food with pretty wine and a new friend is a great way to un*wine*d, no matter what the weather.

Cheers!

Jeannette

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Mar 23 2010

cotton candy, deep hole earth & a rainy day

Category: Wine tasting — admin @ 5:59 pm

Appies, dinner & dessert – a fairly standard order. There’s also a “recommended” wine tasting order: whites before reds, lighter before fuller-bodied and sweeter dessert or late harvest wines last. Makes sense, right? Sure – but that doesn’t mean it has to happen that way. As for talking about wine, well, I’m going to make you wait until the end of the blog-meal before I serve up the (lighter) special treat. Because I can.

Wine tasting is something I recommend you do with a buddy, friend or random stranger you meet outside the tasting room. You know what I’m talking about: you’re on the tasting circuit and realize you’re following or being followed by that sylish couple with the cool glasses or the gentleman that likes to talk to himself. It’s inevitable.

Where was I? Right – tasting with friends.

My fella likes to dip into the wine with me, but sometimes I like to bring along a friend who has a) different knowledge than me, b) a few spare hours and c) a good sense of humour because my descriptors aren’t standard WSET lingo (as you might have guessed by now). One of the friends I like to taste wines with is Luke, the empire builder from an earlier wineopoly post.

Luke joined me for some tasting the other night; here’s an sample of how it went.

Me: Deep hole earth.

Luke: Hmmm, really?

Me: It’s like I’m in a big hole and it smells like earth from deep down.

Luke: That’s interesting.

See what I mean? There was some cursing involved (in a good way – sometimes descriptors need a bit of oomph), discussion about cropping and yield per acre (on Luke’s part – I sat and listened) and talk of good barnyard smell versus bad barnyard smell. On the whole, I learned (as usual) a bit from Luke and he (I’m sure) got a good laugh. Deep hole earth says it all.

I tried my first BC Zweigelt, from Arrowleaf in Lake Country. A long, deep inhale on this baby took me to carnivals and cotton candy. That’s right – cotton candy. But it’s a spicy little grape, and on shorter sniffs I could have been walking past the spice aisle in a grocery store. I fell in love with zweigelt (say it like svy-gelt) in Ontario’s Niagara Region, and I’m happy that BC wineries are producing it too. This one’s a bit more cherryish than peppery, and it looks like purple, velvet curtains. Very cool.

On the docket was a Merlot from Twisted Tree in Osoyoos – and damn it’s a nice looking bottle! Seriously folks, the bottle itself has presence, and is pretty sexy. When I think BC merlot, I think dark and sexy. This is the wine that made me think deep hole earth. It also made me think of rich liquors and cassis, and blackberry porter (yes, I drink beer too). Get your hands on a bucket of overripe blackberries and some deep hole earth and you’ve got this merlot. I warned you that I wouldn’t use wine-speak.

It’s time for dessert. Not that this wine tasted like dessert – it’s just that it’s the bomb, the bee’s knees, the freakin’ stellar event of our wine tasting night. It’s the Pinot Noir from Howling Bluff on the Naramata bench. Two words: rainy day. A whiff of this little gem was like walking on a sidewalk after a summer rain, when the stones and ground are still wet and everything’s got that clean-rain-smell. The more we sniffed and slurped, the more we oohed and aahed over it. Simple tasting, like chocolate and cherries and summer, but with that fantastic rainy day smell. Perfect.

It’s nice to enjoy a glass (or two) of wine by yourself – I’ve been known to do that myself on occasion. Don’t look in our recycle bin. But it’s way more fun when you’ve got some friends with you and you’re just drinking and chatting. That’s when things like deep hole earth happen. And there’s nothing more un*wine*d than that.

Cheers!

Jeannette

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