By Dan Steeves
[This bottle was provided as a sample for review purposes.]
As a follow up to Peter’s review of the first Co-op Social Collection bottle, the Bin 101 Cabernet Sauvignon, we now move onto the second bottle of our trio, Bin 107 Pinot Blanc, which hits a little closer to home. This bottle’s front label clearly shows it is a product of Canada, and upon examining the back label, you notice further clues as to the wine’s origin. Underneath the grape variety is written “Golden Mile – Oliver, BC Canada”, and further down it shows that the wine was exclusively produced and bottled by Castoro de Oro Estate Winery in Oliver BC.
The region south of the town of Oliver and north of the town of Osoyoos is commonly referred to as the Golden Mile due to the amount of wineries off the highway between the two towns. However, stating “Golden Mile” on a label does not have an official meaning — this term shouldn’t be confused with the very-similar label designation “Golden Mile Bench”, which an area up off the valley floor that shows unique climate and soil types and which is now recognized as an official sub-Geographical Indication within the Okanagan Valley GI. That said, all wines made in this part of the Okanagan are well known for their high quality due to the ideal climate: hot daytime temperatures, cool nights, and limited rainfall (it is for all intents and purposes a desert).
This will be the last PnP post for a while – in a couple days I’ll be escaping the country on summer vacation and will not be thinking much at all about word counts or flavour descriptors while I’m gone. Expect palm tree and sea turtle Instagram pictures and not much else until the end of the month. I therefore felt compelled to send off July on the blog with a double-feature, a head-to-head review of two Old World value level wines with near-identical just-a-shade-over-$20 price tags and almost nothing else in common. It’s Italy vs. France, a contest of different grapes, winemaking styles, vintages and approaches, with the main unifying links being longstanding traditional estates and a quest to over-deliver on quality for a supermarket price tag. Enjoy the summer! 
I grew up in the days of monopolized government liquor sales and distribution in Alberta, and I distinctly remember going into the squat brick AGLC store with my parents when they were on the hunt for a new bottle of wine or spirits. While government-controlled retail alcohol is still the norm in much of Canada, Alberta thankfully broke free of its state shackles before I hit adulthood, and now, not really that much later, it is a completely different world, with an ever-increasing number of remarkable producers from across the globe available in our market and very few barriers to introducing even more. Slower to develop have been wine-buying alternatives to the standard visit to a retail shop: online ordering, home delivery, personalized sourcing. I can get almost every work of literature ever created from Amazon Prime within two business days, but our gloriously liberal wine commerce architecture has not yet fully embraced the electronic age and the consumer convenience that can come with it. That’s why I always root for those ventures who come along and try.
I first got seriously into wine about 10 years ago, when the Australia Phenomenon was in its heyday and Argentinian Malbec was just a glint in some clever investor’s eye in Mendoza. Yellow Tail Shiraz was my gateway drug, a fact that is assuredly true of more than one of you currently reading this as well. Looking back now on the Australian wine scene then, there are still tons of similarities. Critter wines, like it or not, are still a thing. On the quality pinnacle, the high-end wines from Down Under rocking people’s worlds in 2017 aren’t that different from those doing so in 2007. But I’ve noticed a couple clear differences in the imports from Australia that have evolved over the last decade: first, a welcome explosion of site-driven elegance from the cooler areas of the country, be it Pinot from Yarra or Mornington or bubbles from Tasmania or the laser purity of some of the post-modern wines coming out of the Adelaide Hills. Second, a new focus on bottles like the ones below, step-up bottlings, a shade above entry-level in price and a world above the critters in authenticity and quality. The $20-$30 tier of wines has never had stronger representation on our shelves from Australia than it does currently, as more and more producers zone in on these bottles as the best way to build a lasting relationship of trust with consumers as opposed to an $11 fling.
Ever since I first saw The Hatch’s avian-Thomas-Crown-Affair primary logo shortly after it opened a couple years ago, I have been sort of transfixed from a distance, finding both the winery and its artistic ethos strangely compelling despite knowing basically nothing about them. Based out of a rustic-modern “shack from the future” in the heights of West Kelowna and sourcing grapes from across the Okanagan and Similkameen Valleys, The Hatch initially comes across (quite intentionally) more like an artists’ collective than a commercial winery, 
The Hatch releases its wines in stylistic series, of which I had the opportunity to experience two: the mid-tier Hobo Series wines, featuring a panoply of hand-drawn labels of hobos (seriously) that risk making you cry thanks to their sheer beauty (also seriously), and the ambitious Black Swift Vineyards series wines, which collectively form an expansive single-vineyard project focused on the various facets of BC’s glorious dirt. The wine, like the winery, was never boring. 
cabernetdialectic (Raymond Lamontagne)
Dan Steeves
Peter Vetsch
tylerderksen
pop & pour 