Wine touring is all about meeting your expectations. The chance to breeze through the vineyards in wine country as you seek and sip your favorite bottles. If you are looking for a lively wine touring experience filled with grand showcase wineries, majestic lake views, quaint gift shops, and opulent destination resorts, then keep moving down Route 3 to the Okanagan. There’s nothing like that in this valley.
Welcome to the Similkameen Valley. Forget about Starbucks, there aren’t even traffic lights in this part of the world. The focus here is on living a natural lifestyle. It’s not hard to forget about natural since it literally towers over you in this deep and extremely scenic valley.
It is in Cawston, in the most southerly region of the Similkameen that John and Virginia Weber have chosen to build their winery, Orofino. Crafting mostly single-vineyard variety-based wines along with a blend or two, the emphasis at Orofino has been quality. The roster of growers, many of whom are also neighbors, are luckily in simpatico with their desire to create intense, complex, age-worthy, and tasty wines. The relationship between grower and vintner can be tricky waters to navigate because each may have different goals in mind regarding quality and quantity. Orofino has managed to create a spectacular lineup of wines with their growers because the focus extends beyond the simple goal of selling products. The goal here is great wine made in a great community. The relationships in this region are evidently stronger than the need to be competitive.
Evidence of this comes through even in the best of times. When I sat down with John Weber in mid-February, it was just days before Orofino’s Syrah 2009 took home the gold medal as the top wine at the Gold Medal Plates Canadian Culinary Championships in Kelowna on February 11th. In a Similkameen Wineries Association press release soon after, John thanked the growers of the winning Syrah, Murray and Maggie Fonteyne of Cawston’s Scout Vineyard “for their terrific work in growing these grapes for us.” When one wins, everyone wins. Welcome to the Sim.
Wines Tasted in this podcast:
Riesling 2007
Gamay 2010
Pinot Noir 2009
Syrah 2009
Passion Pit Cabernet Sauvignon 2009
Beleza 2009
(EXCLUSIVE! If you listen very carefully, John will mention a special new wine to be released this coming spring! You heard it here first!)
We’re starting off the year by welcoming back an old friend. Soaring Eagle returned last fall with a small lineup of wines and Nick and I tasted one of them recently. Here’s what happened…
This week, we focus on something that a great many ‘serious’ wine lovers seem to disregard: Rosé. It’s almost a bad word among a certain generation of wine lovers who won’t touch the stuff.
THAT IS GREAT!! Please keep ignoring it!
Keep assuming that it’s all simple, sweet, girly wines and pay no mind to it at all. Without you wanting to buy it, demand will stay low and prices will match it accordingly.
For the rest of us who know about how good r-o-s-é’s from BC can be, here’s an awesome one from Bartier-Scholefield (produced at the Okanagan Crush Pad in Summerland) that Nick and I tried recently. Cheers!
The grapes have been harvested for the season and the winemakers and cellar staff are busy pressing and fermenting. We talk about what goes on in the wineries at harvest time and how those grapes make it into your bottle. Join us with a great bottle of Road 13′s Jackpot Chardonnay!
In our third installment, we talk about the two sides of the valley just south of Oliver, the Wine Capitol of Canada. On the west side, the Golden Mile with its history and diversity, and on the east side – the Black Sage bench, with its distinctive terroir. Join us for a tasting of Quinta Ferreira’s Syrah 2007 that you won’t want to miss.
Lots of wine here and the best thing is that it’s so easy to get there. It’s right on the highway and there’s tons of easy parking, especially for those of you traveling in RV’s or with a trailor. Their parking lot looks like it can accomodate at least 4 (probably more) full-sized RV’s or pickups with 5th wheel trailors without backing up or any crazy parking lot tricks. It’s on the west side of Highway 97 and is on the right as you head south from the town of Oliver.
The other great thing about this winery is that there are lots of different styles of wine here for every palate. Crisp pinot Grigio’s (called Mamma Mia) and big, dark, full-bodied reds (check out Maximus). All of that is surrounded by a beautiful large wine shop that makes you forget that the highway is only steps away.
Alright, I have to admit that I have a been a member of the ‘Foch Club’ for a while. I first tried Quail’s old vines foch a while ago with the 2000 or 2001 vintages and they were great – they were big and tasty without the drying tannic feel that usually accompanies big red wines. The local wine store manager told me that the foches from Quail’s had a loyal following and that the few cases that they were given were usually snapped up quite quickly.
So I was a little more than excited when I first saw the new vintage of the foch arrive from Quail’s Gate recently. It has a complex nose – sage, tar, black liquorice and red cherries – quite complex and a refreshing change from some of the simpler wines that we had been tasting earlier that week. It wasn’t as complex on the palate but had a good combination of dark fruit, plums, tar and leather to make it interesting.
Medium acid and low tannins, which is par for the course when it comes to foch, means that this variety doesn’t really age all that well. I learned that one the hard way when my 2001 foch from Quail’s Gate sat for 5 years in my less-than-ideal condo cellar. When we opened it, the fruit had left the building and taken most of the furniture with it. It tasted like dirt, although good quality dirt. This foch-not-really-good-at-aging thing was confirmed that same year when, visiting some family in Toronto, they opened a bottle of a ’98 foch from the Niagara with similar results. I like earthy, rustic, old-world style wines as much as anyone, but I do like to have at least a hint of fruit to remind me that the liquid in the glass did come from a grape.
Anyways, back to the ’07 Quail’s Gate Old Vines Foch – it is still hands down the best in the Okanagan and the ones to which all other foches aspire. It should be widely available throughout BC in specialty and VQA stores. Give it a try and let me know what you think. Are you the newest member of the foch club?
We mostly hear about wines being over-priced. Sticker shock when browsing the shelves, especially for BC wines, is very common. This wine will still shock you, but in a much better way – it is only $15.00 and it delivers.
The color of this wine is relatively light, more akin to a pinot noir. It’s nose suggests ripe cherries, bricks and earth. The palate has lots of red fruit, leather, earth, and vanilla, but nothing dominates – it is pleasantly balanced and smooth. Drink it on its own or as a perfect match with pork (pork tenderloin on the grill perhaps) or chicken.
Tempranillo, the grape, is more often associated with Spain and hasn’t really been seen very much in BC. Inniskilin Okanagan on the Golden Mile, south of Oliver, and Twisted Tree in Osoyoos are the only other wineries that I know of currently that grow it. Inniskillin makes an icewine with theirs while Twisted Tree has a dry red, which I’m itching to try. Their offerening (at $28) is almost double the price of D’Angelo’s, which makes this dry wine a pretty sweet deal. Cheers!
… are all being worked on as we speak. We will be recording the pilot of our podcast soon and will be starting with more reviews and opinions on all things related to the BC wine industry very soon. There’s a lot to say about it at the moment and I’m itching to get started.
There’s a lot going on in the industry right now and it seems like it’s a pivotal time in the history of our wine region. There are new wineries coming online every year, new varieties and styles, and new ideas about what the Okanagan and BC wines are capable of achieving. The most interesting thing about it at this point however, is that most of that growth has happened in a bit of a bubble. And with the current changing economic picture, what will happen to the industry and how it has been built / regulated / sustained? The wine industry in BC has been sheltered so far (especially regarding the world oversupply of wine, although it also seems that other regions are not taking that problem seriously either) and we have been content with editorials that continually call into the question the use of the cork over the screw cap as the closure of choice, as if that will solve the problem of wine quality once and for all.
Honestly, there must be more pressing concerns to write about in magazine and newspaper wine columns. And by the time screw caps do become completely accepted (which I argue will never fully happen) the bottle itself will be a thing of the past in favour of the Tetra-Pak at the middle to lower price points. (Cork and glass bottles will become a luxury for those who can afford it.) Oil changes everything, even wine. As soon as the cost of producing and transporting a glass bottle (even with a screw cap) becomes more expensive than a current $8 bottle of wine, Tertra-Pak or other similar packaging will be the only economical way. Glass bottles will be only for the expensive good juice and the whole debate about screw caps will be a quaint little question in some future version of Trivial Pursuit.
Of course, it is easier to dedicate editorial space to easy targets like screw caps and not to wine quality. Most tasting notes are usually full of pleasant descriptors about what each wine offers without any indication of the quality of the wine. Is it good? What does 89 points mean? Is it really that much better than 88 points? Is it good? What about the crap? Surely there must be some crappy wines, why aren’t they reviewed anywhere in the reviews. Oh, maybe it’s because they’ve payed for the full page advertisement on page 3? Things that make you go, “Hmmm…”
And then there’s VQA…
So there are only a few things with which to get started. For our podcasts, we’ll be tasting a couple of wines each episode and discussing a theme with our panel of local wine lovers. Please tell your friends who are interested in BC wine to get ready for a new generation of wine discussion. Cheers!
It is in Cawston, in the most southerly region of the Similkameen that John and Virginia Weber have chosen to build their winery, Orofino. Crafting mostly single-vineyard variety-based wines along with a blend or two, the emphasis at Orofino has been quality. The roster of growers, many of whom are also neighbors, are luckily in simpatico with their desire to create intense, complex, age-worthy, and tasty wines. The relationship between grower and vintner can be tricky waters to navigate because each may have different goals in mind regarding quality and quantity. Orofino has managed to create a spectacular lineup of wines with their growers because the focus extends beyond the simple goal of selling products. The goal here is great wine made in a great community. The relationships in this region are evidently stronger than the need to be competitive.
Happy New Year!
