Bordelais Nouveau: Chateau Argadens

5 04 2022

[These bottles were provided as samples for review purposes.]

OK, these Bordeaux aren’t THAT new, but in a region that often measures time in centuries, a winery that is a scant two decades old counts as a fresh face. The wines (to my palate, anyway) also come across as efforts best explored while they are young and energetic, without the need to let them sit, mellow and expand as often seen in their counterparts. But it’s Bordeaux, so even the new wines from the new source are steeped in ancient history.

Maison Sichel is a lion of the mid-range Bordeaux scene, with an astonishing array of labels and brands under its expert umbrella. In 2002, it expanded its holdings by buying a property ringed with vineyards located in Entre-Deux-Mers, about 60 km south of the town of Bordeaux, and it harkened back to the site’s ancient origins to come up with a name. Argadens was the name of the noble family that first founded the estate back in the 13th century (NOW this sounds more like a true Bordeaux timeline), so the Sichel family decided to pay homage, and Chateau Argadens was born. They immediately made significant investments in all areas of the estate, from vineyard restructuring to planting adjustments to modernizing the winery facilities and constructing a brand new maturation cellar. The property produces a single red and a single white wine each year, released as a standalone label within the Sichel atmosphere. These are Chateau Argadens, bridging the old and the new in one of the world’s most historic regions.

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Flat Rock Cellars: An Ontario Boutique Pioneer

11 03 2022

By Raymond Lamontagne

[These bottles were provided as samples for review purposes.]

I almost literally jumped at this opportunity to blog an Ontario winery. Although I’m a western boy born and raised, and therefore somewhat imbued with the trappings of a “friendly rivalry” with all things associated with the centre of the Canadian universe, I do have some roots in the province. Trips out to see my wonderful in-laws have solidified a curiosity around Ontario wines, if not a budding passion that has so far survived some edifying (if not exactly lovely) experiences with bargain-priced local bottlings made from hybrid grapes. Add in the fact that the Alberta market is saturated with wines from our climate-change-plagued neighbour to the west, and I’m always looking for something different from our home country’s wine scene. Enter Flat Rock Cellars, a technologically proficient yet philosophically irreverent winery nestled within the confines of Ontario’s Twenty Mile Bench.

The Twenty Mile Bench is one of ten sub-appellations of the greater Niagara Peninsula region, a large area so diverse as to defy ready generalizations apart from the climate-moderating effects of Lake Ontario. More than half of Ontario’s VQA wineries fall within this overarching boundary. Fortunately we can provide more focused and useful characterizations of the smaller sub-appellations, and the Twenty Mile Bench provides an illuminating example of what Ontario can do with cool climate varieties. The area is a complex checkerboard of small, moderately steep slopes at high overall elevation, which affords relatively long periods of sun exposure. Breezes off the lake serve to circulate warm air, extending daytime temperatures into the evening. This provides ideal ripening conditions for high-acid cool climate varieties.

The soils here are predominately clay with a liberal dose of limestone, with a solid capacity to retain moisture that can mitigate the worst effects of drought. These are excellent soils for stress-prone mature vines. Some accomplished sommeliers propose that deep clays can lend a pronounced fruitiness to the resulting wines, while limestone lends a razor edge of acidity. Although I am leery of such umbrella proclamations even as I enjoy digesting them, these broad brush strokes around terroir make me wonder about the potential for a glorious balance in well-made Twenty Mile Bench wines: structured and fresh yet fruity, precise and pixelated yet pleasurable. Flat Rock Cellars seems poised to deliver on such a promise.

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Amulet Wines: Fall 2021 Releases

1 11 2021

By Peter Vetsch

[These bottles were provided as samples for review purposes]

One of the most anticipated sets of releases out of the Okanagan Valley for me every year are those of Amulet, winemaker Dwight Sick’s Rhone-fuelled collaboration with Dylan and Penelope Roche. Made at Roche’s winery near Penticton, from grapes sourced via Sick’s extensive network of prime vineyard sources (including Kiln House Vineyard, which is assuredly Canada’s most established Grenache site), the Amulet wines are always honest, complex and expressive, firmly demonstrating that Rhone varietals might be BC’s most exciting viticultural play right now. The most arresting part of the Amulet visual experience is the striking golden metal medallion painstakingly hand-glued to each bottle, a replica of an Elizabethan era talismanic coin showcasing St. Michael battling a dragon. Amulet’s recent set of releases breaks new ground in two different ways: not only do they feature a brand new Amulet wine, but also a second medallion, this one dragon-free, featuring a merchant ship at sea and an embossed inscription that translates to: “This is the Lord’s doing and it is marvellous.” It sure is. It took all my willpower not to peel it off the bottle so I could collect the whole set.

The Amulet wines are all crafted using minimal intervention in the cellar: indigenous yeast fermentation, no fining or filtering, and very low doses of SO2 at bottling. Production is microscopic and demand increasingly high, so much so that individual bottle limits had to be imposed on online orders in the Roche Wines shop. The new addition this year is a reserve-level Syrah that pushes its way into consideration as our country’s best rendition of the grape, cementing the vision and increasing confidence of this fledgling label. Bring on the medallions.

New medallion!
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Revisiting the Classics: Joseph Drouhin Bourgogne

23 08 2021

By Peter Vetsch

[These bottles were provided as samples for review purposes.]

And we’re back. After a brief summer hiatus that involved winery visits, wildfires, new home purchases, way too much packing (with much more to come) and a tiny bit of unplugging from the electronic world, we are hitting the ground running for the impending fall season and have a number of posts lined up for the next few months. Many of them, including the one scheduled after this, focus their attention on uncharted waters: new regions, grapes and bottles, the next frontier of wine exploration. One of the most beautiful things about wine appreciation is that the horizon always stretches farther, and the universe of experience and education is for all practical purposes infinite, allowing for a continual push toward the novel and unexpected. That said, every so often there is value in checking back in with the benchmarks, those classic regions, producers or expressions that have become the North Stars for a particular varietal or style. When we weigh a new vinous experience, we subconsciously measure it against those comparators that first taught us what a given grape or appellation is all about, which can anchor our expectations of what it means to successfully execute concepts like Cabernet Sauvignon, or traditional-method bubbles, or Bordeaux. When the concepts and expectations are shifted to Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Burgundy, one of the key benchmarks and measuring sticks is undoubtedly Joseph Drouhin.

Maison Joseph Drouhin was founded in Beaune in 1880 as a small negociant producer. Three generations later, it is a Burgundian lodestone, with property in nearly 90 different appellations in Burgundy strewn across 80 hectares located from Chablis in the north down to the Cote Chalonnaise in the south, all meticulously purchased over the years. Joseph Drouhin’s four grandchildren now run the estate, including head winemaker Veronique Drouhin-Boss, (who is also in charge of the winery’s excellent Willamette Valley venture Domaine Drouhin Oregon). Drouhin was one of the first producers in Burgundy to do away with chemical pesticides and revert to horse plowing and natural compost in the fields; now all of its estate vineyards are farmed organically and biodynamically. Their dense plantings, arranged to secure low and concentrated yields, hail from vine stocks grown in their own nursery so that the estate can retain full control over plant quality. While Drouhin’s single-vineyard expressions include some of the most rare and sought-after Crus in all of Burgundy, today we explore the baseline Bourgogne appellation wines which return Maison Joseph Drouhin to its negociant roots, using purchased fruit from longtime suppliers located all across Burgundy to craft a template for white and red Burgundy.

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Calgary (Virtual) Wine Life: Vina Chocalan Tasting with Fernando Espina

6 06 2021

By Peter Vetsch and Raymond Lamontagne

Perhaps the only good thing about the state of our current COVID world is that you can still attend a wine tasting even if you miss it. Scheduling conflicts prevented our attendance at the recent portfolio tasting that winemaker Fernando Espina of Chile’s Vina Chocalan ran for key Canadian markets, but like everything else these days, the tasting was virtual, and thankfully for us it was recorded for posterity. A couple of days and a bottle delivery later, we were in business, and we were extremely thankful not to miss out on an introduction to a tremendously compelling winery honouring its maritime climate to the fullest extent.

Vina Chocalan is a multi-generational family winery that came into the wine business from a unique parallel industry. You hear a lot of stories about long-time grape farmers who finally take the next step with the fruits of their labour and try their hand at winemaking; you hear far fewer about people who instead come to wine from the glass in. Vina Chocalan’s Toro family owns the second biggest glass bottle factory in Chile and has supplied bottles to wineries around the world for six decades. In the late 1990s, they decided that they should put something in their own bottles themselves, and a grand project was born, focusing initially on the coastal western side of Chile’s Maipo Valley. While the Maipo is the heart of Chilean viticulture, in particular anchoring the nation’s red wine production, no one had planted a vineyard along the Valley’s Coastal Mountain Range until Vina Chocalan did so in 1998, planting 114 hectares out of a 350-hectare plot located a scant 35 kilometres from the Pacific Ocean ahead of their first commercial production in 2001. The next year, they took a step even further into the unknown, establishing a second estate and 25 hectares of white-focused plantings by the village of Malvilla in the San Antonio Valley, located almost due west from the Maipo and only FOUR kilometres from the Pacific. This extremely cool-climate site is a completely different expression of Chilean wine, and a reminder that the best wines nowadays are often made right at the edge of the line.

Hegemonic producer Concha y Toro, one of the 10 largest wineries in the world, might have had something to say about it if the Toro family had opted to name their nascent winery after themselves. They instead opted for their less-litigious moniker Vina Chocalan, which means “yellow blossoms”, after a prevalent local thorn bush flower in the vineyards. Our introduction to the winery came in the form of a half-dozen bottles ranging across both the Maipo and San Antonio estates, whites and reds that emphatically confirm this is a producer to know. Three bottles each, a new universe to explore. Buckle up.

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Categories : Calgary Wine Life, Wine Reviews

Distinctive Australian Whites (Almost)

30 04 2021

By Peter Vetsch

[These bottles were provided as samples for review purposes.]

I had it all planned out. Australia is a red wine country, but is developing pockets of renown for dramatic and exciting whites that were worth their own dedicated post. One pioneering winery Down Under with particular experience in one such white grape had recently decided to create a new international vinous holiday as an ode to it, and I thought I had a bottle of that very variety from that very producer tucked away in the cellar. Kismet. My theme was set, my plan ready, my mind willing. It came…sort of close to working out. While you will quickly see the monkey wrench thrown into the works, the bottles below, and Australia’s burgeoning white wine culture generally, remain well worth highlighting and supporting. In addition to the new and classic styles of Southern Hemisphere white discussed in this post, don’t sleep on Hunter Valley Semillon (especially if you can wait 10+ years on it), Adelaide Hills Gruner Veltliner (yes, there is such a thing), Margaret River or Tasmanian Chardonnay (dangerously close to the very best out there), sweet Rutherglen Muscat, and all the other regional white wonders that Australia has to offer. It’s a world of possibilities in a single country, for which the below trio of nearly-whites offers a tantalizing glimpse.

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Wine Review: Friends of Oceania

3 02 2021

By Peter Vetsch

[These bottles were provided as samples for review purposes.]

Since we can’t travel right now (without being wildly irresponsible, at least), I find myself lingering more in the memories of places I’ve been. We went to Australia and New Zealand on our honeymoon in 2008, and were so smitten with the latter that we went back again, this time with kids in tow, for our 10th anniversary in 2018. Obviously a return voyage in seven more years will have to be in the works; rarely have I felt more at home in a place so far away. Our more recent NZ vacation featured a day trip through the South Island Sauvignon Blanc wonderland of Marlborough, which is both more pastoral and more compact than I would have expected in light of the extraordinary production figures emanating from the region, enough to flood global retail shelves with a piercingly distinctive take on an otherwise broadly familiar grape.

The visit included a stop at Greywacke, to me a pinnacle producer of the region, started by a man who found fame in wine and then reimagined the pursuit, this time on a more personal, artisanal scale. I got to show my sons grapevines, one of whom was old enough to take a passing interest in the subject. He has a special affinity to the winery that bears his name, from a country that he has yet to see, in a part of Australia that I have yet to visit myself. Vasse Felix will always be royalty in our household by word association, aided by the fact that their entire lineup is consistently exceptional, never chasing trends, always honest to its vision and its surroundings. That Vasse Felix’s entry-level wines bear the name “Filius” or “son of”, is hopefully as heartwarming to fathers of Felixes everywhere and not just to me. I currently feel like I would love to take off to ANYWHERE, but I would especially love to be back on this side of the world. For the time being, I will use these bottles as transport instead.

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Calliope: (End of) Summer Releases

27 08 2020

By Peter Vetsch

[These bottles were provided as samples for review purposes.]

I have recently seen an opinion expressed more and more on wine-drenched social media:  that wine should be more expensive.  The basis behind the statement is that quality farming techniques, proper vineyard vigilance, ethical labour compensation and the avoidance of interventionist winemaking heuristics all cost money, and supporting a rigorous and chemical-free production process not only pays off in the result, but is worth paying more for on the shelf.  I empathize with the sentiment, and generally agree with the idea that more handmade vine-growing and winemaking processes necessitate a greater degree of care and focus in order to achieve success, which in turn can raise the ceiling of a wine’s potential.  I routinely pay more money for wines like this, which strive for quality through attentiveness.

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That said, there will always be a place for gateway wines, for both economic and marketing reasons.  There is a fairly significant portion of the wine-drinking population who won’t, or can’t, pay substantial sums for a single bottle of wine, regardless of its ostensible merit or authenticity.  In addition, our closest local winemaking industry here in Alberta, the Okanagan Valley next door, already faces pricing pressures to land on retail shelves at costs that are at least somewhat competitive to the Chilean and Argentinian offerings in the next aisle over, due to higher land and personnel costs and a host of other reasons.  If you want to convince people to pay a bit more for a certain region’s wines and to drink better as a result, you have to start them somewhere that combines both immediate enjoyment and and a subtle hint that they’re just starting to scratch the surface.  Enter Calliope.

This accessible, approachable, expressive value line from the Wyse family that brought you Burrowing Owl Winery is named after yet another bird (Canada’s smallest bird, in fact – a hummingbird found in southern BC) and is designed to offer wines with clear typicity and bright flavours in an attractive package that doesn’t scare people off.  While they could maybe do with a bit less stock photography on their website, their wines have consistently achieved this goal, and opened up the world of BC wines to new consumers as a result.  Calliope’s latest set of releases seek to maintain the formula, and bring some pink back into the winery’s vocabulary to boot.  But first, the whites. Read the rest of this entry »


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Culmina: Summer 2020 Releases

21 07 2020

By Peter Vetsch

[These bottles were provided as samples for review purposes.]

I love getting wines hot off the presses, just as they are hitting the market for the first time.  There is always a sense of anticipation associated with latest vintages of wines you have come to appreciate over time; with a baseline of familiarity about a particular bottle’s standard expression, it’s much easier to pick out differences based on vintage conditions or stylistic variations in winemaking.  Instead of trying to puzzle out what a wine is all about, you can look for how it approached a given year, what it suffered through to make it into the bottle, or whether its new rendition stretched its ambition or capabilities.

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I was especially interested in tracking the evolution of this latest set of releases from the Golden Mile Bench’s Culmina Family Estate Winery, as it was this month last year when it was announced that the estate’s founding family had sold the winery to Arterra Wines Canada, whose number of wineries under ownership has cleared the triple digits.  Arterra’s reach in the Okanagan includes stalwarts such as Laughing Stock, Nk’mip, See Ya Later Ranch and Sumac Ridge, as well as Jackson-Triggs, whose co-founder Don Triggs also founded Culmina, and also founded Arterra’s corporate predecessor Vincor International, a few mergers and acquisitions ago.  Time is a flat circle.  Don and his wife Elaine are now enjoying a well-deserved retirement (for real this time), leaving Culmina in the hands of winemaker Jean-Marc Enixon and the established winery management team.  What will they do with it?  The 2019 releases are our first chance to find out. Read the rest of this entry »


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Synchromesh Wines, Part II: Storm Haven Awaits

14 05 2020

By Peter Vetsch

[These bottles were provided as samples for review purposes.]

After last weekend’s right-on-cue random Calgary mid-May hailstorm-then-blizzard combo, I now feel comfortable saying that spring has finally arrived in our corner of the world, far later than it should have, as always.  When things turn green and start to grow, and when the world once again sheds its winter coat for another half-turn around the sun, I tend to reach for wines of brightness, freshness.  The heavy reds have their time and place, but it is not here and now.  After Ray’s excellent introduction to the history and new offerings of the rapidly ascending Synchromesh Wines, and after watching my environment awaken and shift into growth mode, I needed some Riesling.  Good thing I have three.

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As noted in our last post, Synchromesh’s crown jewel site is the place where it all began for the winery, the Storm Haven Vineyard right near (and well above) Okanagan Falls.  A subsequent acquisition of an adjacent parcel on the same hillside brought the total vineyard acreage up to 107 acres, but of that only 21 acres are planted to vines, with the rest intentionally left accessible for wildlife habitat and conservation works.  This allows the Dickinson family both to help out local wildlife charities and to ensure that Storm Haven remains an active, lively, biodiverse site in which the vines are a harmonious partner instead of an invasive intruder.  Altitudes range from 1300 to over 2000 feet as the vineyard rises up the base of Peach Cliff Mountain, straddling a fault line and enjoying the corresponding mineral explosion in the sandy loam soils (quartz, granite, slate, metal deposits) that goes along with such geologically interesting positioning.

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Storm Haven Vineyard.  Photo Credit: Andrew Melville.

Riesling makes up over 70% of the plantings here — I was honestly surprised they planted anything else at this hallowed Riesling altar, one of the top sites for this grape in the country.  The remaining acreage is largely comprised of Cabernet Franc and Pinot Noir, except for a single block (0.33 acres) of own-rooted Cinsault which was planted last year.  It’s safest to assume that the latter is destined for rosé, but I would absolutely buy a single-vineyard Storm Haven red Cinsault, if Synchromesh needed any further production ideas.  Tonight’s Rieslings all express the site-hewn power, intensity and scope of Storm Haven, but in varying degrees.  All also hew to Synchromesh’s Riesling credo of low alcohol, notable residual sugar and incisive acidity; the combined ABV of this trio of wines is 24.14%, basically equivalent to a single bottle of Turley and a Moscato.  Let’s start at the quieter end of the crescendo, although with these wines “quiet” only applies in a relative sense. Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: 2019 Amulet Rosé

18 04 2020

By Peter Vetsch

[This bottle was provided as a sample for review purposes.]

What better exemplifies the highly bizarre combination we currently face — our relieved celebration of the actual arrival of spring (I hope) after an astoundingly long winter, plus our enhanced need for vinous companionship amidst the eternal stress of a global viral pandemic — than a gigantic magnum of rosé?  And of the gigantic magnums (magnii?) of rosé to choose from, what one better exemplifies the resourceful spirit and brave acceptance of  supervening realities that we need to emerge from the other side of our immediate world health catastrophe than the 2019 Amulet Rosé?  (Also, what better time in our world history to clutch any kind of amulet as close as humanly possible, especially ones that you can drink?)  This is the defining wine for our times.  Let me explain.

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I initially tasted the inaugural release from Amulet Wines, winemaker Dwight Sick’s Rhone-focused side collaboration with Dylan and Penelope Roche, this past November.  I was highly intrigued by the red and white 2018 Amulet offerings, the former of which was anchored in the Grenache grapes from the Okanagan Kiln House Vineyard from which Sick had previously grown and bottled the first Canadian varietal Grenache wine ever released, and I looked forward to the 2019 release the next fall.  Instead, I received it in February, very shortly after the 2018s had landed and scant months after the grapes had come off the vine.  And instead of a red and a white, the 2019 vintage featured a double-sized pink:  magnums only, and a mere 258 bottles produced.  Why? Read the rest of this entry »


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Bricks Wine Advent Calendar 2019: Day 3

3 12 2019

By Peter Vetsch

Three days into this year’s half-bottle extravaganza and we haven’t seen a standard-shaped Bordeaux or Burgundy bottle yet.  First off was the reinforced bubbles bottle, followed by the Germanic flute (which trickily held a red), and tonight it became immediately clear that the streak was going to continue.  Can we roll with the punches?  Yes we can.

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This is also the third straight day that I’ve peeled off the tissue paper to find a familiar friendly face:  Day 1’s Tawse has been my go-to Ontario stalwart for years, Day 2’s K.H. Schneider makes the best goddamn Dornfelder in the world, and Day 3’s can is brought to you by the wonderful, hospitable, salt-of-the-earth people at Fox Run Vineyards, from New York State’s gorgeous Finger Lakes area, a winery and a region that I was lucky enough to visit back in 2016.  That was the same year that this wine — sort of — was named the feature white of the Calgary Stampede.  Meet the Fox Run Vineyards On The Run Unoaked Chardonnay, can edition.

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Fox Run is a New York State institution.  This pastoral property on the western shores of Seneca Lake was originally a dairy farm before grapes were first planted there in 1984.  Fast forward 35 years and the winery now owns 50 acres of east-sloping vineyards and focuses on crafting a wide variety of estate wines under the watchful guidance of longtime winemaker Peter Bell.  While they rightly take pride in their excellent Riesling lineup, their Chardonnays are in my mind an equal part of their house identity, both the spritely unoaked Doyle Family Chardonnay and the marvellous barrel-fermented Kaiser Vineyard Chardonnay.  I believe that this can is made up of the former, although the can itself gives away no hints of its specific identity.  The can also strangely does not indicate a vintage, perhaps to avoid the annoyance of having to re-print can labels for each successive harvest; however, I am told that it is most likely not a NV wine and is instead probably the 2018 edition of the Doyle.  This is excellent news, because it means that it is likely also 8% Traminette, a lovably bizarre, slightly soapy, melony hybrid whose vinifera parent is Gewürztraminer (hence the name), which is normally added to the Doyle Chardonnay as a minority blending partner to rev up its personality.  (Fox Run also makes a varietal Traminette, which you absolutely must buy if you ever get the chance.  Traminette is amazing.)

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Cork Rating:  I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to do with this.  2/10.  Nice tab.

First impressions:  spritz!  The release from the can causes multitudes of tiny bubbles to cling to the sides of my glass for a good ten minutes while a reductive matchsticks and smoke aroma blows off.  What remains is a chiselled aromatic profile of fresh lemon, smoked lime, honeydew, wet grass, pina colada and something oddly like boxed cake powder or Premium Plus soup crackers, the latter two of which I will credit to the Traminette.  The olfactory intrigue does not arise due to any lees stirring or barrel contact, of which there was none — Fox Run built the Doyle in as linear a fashion as possible, save only for the incorporation of this Chardonnay’s mischievous blending brother.  The regimented cool-climate style takes over on the crisp, lean, precise palate, whose relatively neutral flavours of Asian pear, underripe white peach, river rocks and chalk dust are energized by a tight line of acidity that is not undercut by any excess in body or weight.  I almost think this would have been better off being drunk straight out of the can as opposed to splayed out in a Burgundy glass — it is a straight-shot linear wine well-suited to patios and campsites, its low alcohol and pH priming it to provide immediate refreshment, but its mission not extending to unfolding in layers over time.  That said, its consistency and focus are a continual joy with each successive vintage, and, it turns out, with any given container.

87+ points


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Bricks Wine Advent Calendar 2019: Day 1

1 12 2019

By Peter Vetsch

And we’re off.  This marks the SIXTH straight year that this site has run a daily play-by-play blog of a boozy Advent calendar (sometimes more than one at once, which inevitably leads to massive regret on my part).  For the last couple years, this has included following along with the wonderfully diverse Bricks Wine Company Half-Bottle Advent Calendar, a concept long considered and now gloriously fulfilled, finding new range with each passing year.  This marks the third annual edition of the Bricks calendar, and if the shapes and tops of the various gift-wrapped 375 mL entrants into this year’s Advent derby are any indication, we may be in for our most intriguing field yet.

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Case in point:  Day 1.  That is NOT a standard screwcap or neck foil that I feel under the wrapping paper.  The prior Bricks calendars have always ended off with bubbles on Day 24, but the wire cage and jumbo pressure-withstanding cork protruding from the gift wrap of this inaugural 2019 offering suggests that this year’s calendar may well be starting off with them too.  And so it is, as the tissue paper falls away to reveal…a hell of a good start.

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The 2016 Tawse Spark Brut hails from my personal favourite winery in Ontario, one that has won the prestigious award for Canada’s Winery of the Year four times (including an impressive three-peat from 2010 through 2012) despite only being 18 years old.  Tawse is a family-owned organic and biodynamic estate that is heavily focused on Burgundian grapes Chardonnay and Pinot Noir (to such an extent that founder and owner Moray Tawse also has a project in Burgundy itself, a collaboration with the renowned Pascal Marchand called, unoriginally, Marchand-Tawse), although it first came to my notice for remarkable Riesling and Cabernet Franc.  Tawse’s focus in the vineyard is to make each swath of vines a complete self-sustaining ecosystem, one that is constantly in balance without the need for any chemicals or external artificial additives to do the balancing.  Animals play a major role in this effort, including chickens (who eat vineyard bugs), sheep (who eat away the lower vine leaves, exposing the grapes to more sunlight) and horses (who are used in lieu of tractors so as to avoid excessive soil compaction).

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The Spark Brut is a traditional-method Champagne-style sparkling wine, made by inducing a secondary fermentation of a previously made still wine within a sealed bottle, which traps escaping CO2 within the resulting wine that is created and allows it extensive contact with the dead yeast cells that remain after the bubble-inducing effort is successful, creating a myriad of textures and flavours not otherwise found in the world of wine.  This offering is made from a surprising 44% Pinot Gris in addition to Champagne stalwarts Pinot Noir (31%) and Chardonnay (25%).  Pinot Gris does not often get the Champagne treatment anywhere outside of Alsace, but Tawse sees fit to elevate it alongside its more renowned Pinot cousin; each of the varietals here are yield-thinned and hand-harvested, then left on lees for 12 months after secondary fermentation before a slight touch of sweetness is added back ahead of bottling.  Each grape used in this wine hails from a different Tawse vineyard, including the Chardonnay, harvested from the mighty Quarry Road (anyone who has had the Tawse Quarry Road Vineyard Chardonnay will understand my singling it out).

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Cork Rating:  1/10 (Shiner cork AND shiner wire cage?  I thought this was Advent!!)

Day 1 emerges an extremely pale lemon colour amidst a steady stream of tiny bubbles, their size and energy a clear indicator of the traditional method at work.  The aromas are pleasantly vibrant for a Champagne-style wine, perhaps a sign of what Pinot Gris can add to a bubble party:  banana leaf, lime curd and honeydew, swirling across southern biscuits and struck match.  Instantly drying on the tongue, the Spark’s lees-induced flavours stand firm and take precedence over the fruit, reasserting the dominance of its winemaking method and erasing any perceptible trace of residual sugar; elastic bands and sourdough bread stretch over tangy melon, tangerine and Granny Smith apple, lending heft and gravitas to an otherwise-playful wine.  This is not ragingly complex, but it’s crispy and approachable and delicious, the kind of thing you would use to kick off a party that sees you crush 24 bottles in 24 days.  Here’s to another wine Advent.

88+ points


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