Wine Review: 2010 Mission Hill Martin’s Lane Pinot Noir

22 08 2012

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

As aptly pointed out by my 19 month old son: P!!!

It was with great sadness that I uncorked (OK, unscrewed) the last of the sample bottles that the Okanagan’s Mission Hill winery had sent my way.  When MH sent me their small-batch limited edition Martin’s Lane Riesling a few weeks ago, they included with it the Riesling’s vineyard twin, the inaugural release of the Martin’s Lane Pinot Noir.  This bottle of Pinot was many years in the making (the vineyard was planted in 1995), but MH held back on releasing it as a single-vineyard offering until the vines and the grapes were fully ready to show their stuff.  I laid out the story behind Martin’s Lane in my Riesling review, but to quickly recap, it’s a high-quality, steeply-sloped vineyard located right by Mission Hill’s winery property just outside of Kelowna, and it’s named as a tribute to MH proprietor Anthony von Mandl’s late father Martin.  Only 485 cases of this Pinot were produced, and this is the first bottle I’ve seen in this province, so unless you live near the winery, this bottle is probably hard to come by.  All the more reason to enjoy it if you have it! Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: 2011 Mission Hill Reserve Riesling

25 06 2012

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

Canada, meet your new favourite grape.

If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you’ll be aware of my completely transparent devotion for Riesling, the top wine grape of all in my books and the star of the show in my favourite white-producing country, Germany.  It’s also a varietal that is starting to be developed more seriously in the major wine regions of my home nation of Canada, both in the Okanagan Valley in the west side of the country and the Niagara Peninsula in the east.  This comes as a huge relief to me:  we’re definitely still a country trying to find its identity wine-wise, and thanks to our climate and latitude it will always be a steep challenge for us to produce big reds in all but the most privileged sites, so one way to get recognition as a serious wine nation in an increasingly competitive market is to focus our energy and resources into developing the absolute best quality wine grapes that thrive in cooler, more marginal conditions.  That’s where Riesling comes in.  It creates some of the best, longest-lived wines in the world, but it also embraces sites at extreme wine-growing latitudes with colder average temperatures and shorter growing seasons…in fact, it reaches its apex in these types of locations.  I think Canada and Riesling are a vinous match made in heaven, so it was with great anticipation that I cracked this bottle, sent to me by one of BC’s largest producers, Mission Hill. Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: 2010 Painted Rock Chardonnay

3 02 2012

Although a newer vintage than the 2009, it's still like going back in time.

The coolest thing about this blog having been around awhile, other than the fact that I’ve miraculously managed to regularly publish an Internet wine blog for the better part of a year, is that I’m starting to come across second vintages in the bottles I open:  current vintage wines whose predecessors I have previously featured on PnP.  Case in point:  the 2010 Painted Rock Chardonnay from the Okanagan Valley, which is probably already facing an uphill battle in this review due to monstrously high expectations because I totally loved the 2009 PR Chard back in September.  I think Painted Rock is a producer on the forefront of the Canadian wine scene, one that is starting to show that we don’t have to settle for local wines that only measure up as against their neighbours, but that can also stand tall on the international market.  While PR focuses primarily on red wine, their lone white is a testament to the wonders of cool-climate Chardonnay, and I thought enough about the ’09 vintage that I absolutely loaded up on the 2010 as soon as it became available.

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Wine Review: 2009 Laughing Stock Syrah

28 09 2011

View from the parking lot: I could get used to looking at this every day.

On my trip to the Okanagan earlier this month, one of the things I was most looking forward to was my visit to Laughing Stock Vineyards, producer of my favourite Canadian red wine of all time and restorer of my faith in (at least some of) my homeland’s wine industry.  We made the trek out to Naramata, located just northeast of Penticton along the shoreline of Lake Okanagan, on a gorgeous late summer day and I was lucky enough to meet LS owner/vineyard manager Cynthia Enns and get a guided tour of the property, which sits on a west-facing slope with an incredible view overlooking the Lake.  I was even luckier that the tasting room still had some of the 2009 Laughing Stock Syrah in stock, which I’d been dying to try, partly because LS had made me think that good Canadian reds were an actual possibility, partly because I generally just love Syrah, and partly because I had never seen this particular wine anywhere in Alberta, giving me (in my head, anyway) a chance at a provincial exclusive.  I bought a couple bottles to take home, and tonight was the first taste trial.  Since the last Canadian Syrah I had before this one smelled and tasted like tomato soup, this had nowhere to go but up. Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: 2009 Painted Rock Chardonnay

21 09 2011

In wine, as in life, discrimination is wrong.

I’m experiencing a sort of Chardonnay renaissance right now. Like so many people, I had soured on the grape after a couple of initial bad experiences with cheap, gloppy, steroidally-oaked monsters that led me to believe that Chard was overrated and undeservedly well-known, the sellout of the white grape family. This, it turns out, is a tragically limited worldview that illustrates the dangers of drawing conclusions based on a small sample size; the problem wasn’t actually that I didn’t like Chardonnay (which is responsible for some of the best, most acclaimed and most expensive white wines in the world), but that I didn’t like bad Chardonnay (which, thankfully, isn’t a problem at all). I have started to distance myself from this rough start with the grape, and despite my previously-ingrained bias, I’ve been noticing that almost every single Chardonnay I’ve had recently has been, well, good. The oak-and-alcohol-bomb style previously so rampant throughout the New World is starting to recede, and the current movement in the world of Chardonnay seems to be more geared toward balance and allowing the flavours of the actual grape (rather than only the barrel it was aged in) to express themselves. This is a positive development for the Canadian wine industry, as this grape probably does its best work in cooler climates, retaining the structure that can be so easily lost in warmer zones yet still ripening even in shorter, colder growing seasons. I was therefore quite surprised during my recent trip to the Okanagan when one winery owner told me that they would be reining back their production of Chardonnay in favour of other white varietals — they made a tremendous, restrained yet flavourful Chard, but they were turning away from it because they thought that Pinot Gris could outsell it 5 to 1. My newfound appreciation for the world’s best-known white grape must have hit me then, because my first immediate thought was: “Has everybody gone nuts?”

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Wine Review: 2010 Dirty Laundry “Madam’s Vines” Gewurztraminer

16 09 2011

The folks at Dirty Laundry are marketing geniuses.

I love the sign at the bottom right that says "Scenic Outlook: That Way". "Really?! Where?"

They have their own unique story — namely, that the current site of the winery used to be home to a laundromat that illicitly doubled as a brothel during the Gold Rush era — and they stick to it with rigorous discipline in absolutely everything they do, from their wine names to their label art, winery decor to gift shop souvenirs (yes, there’s a gift shop).  All of their production and sales efforts are relentlessly to brand, and the secretly naughty tale of the brand generates a lot of interest; before my recent trip to the Okanagan, DL was one of the places I was told I absolutely had to see.  So one day we ventured out to Summerland, a half hour southwest of Kelowna, and drove up (and up, and up) a series of winding backcountry roads until we found it, high up in the hills above the town overlooking the Lake.  We were treated to a thoroughly modern tasting room, with a brand new gorgeous outdoor patio (complete with giant clothespins and lingerie gently swaying in the breeze) and an amazing view of the surrounding area.  However, amidst all the winks to its shady past and seamless self-promotion, Dirty Laundry got slack about one thing:  the wine. Read the rest of this entry »


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