pop & pour

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.

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 »