By Raymond Lamontagne
[These bottles were provided as samples for review purposes.]
Familiarity tends to breed appreciation, at least to a point, and I am pleased to revisit Castoro de Oro in bottle form, after Peter’s informative trek through their new canned offerings. Although you can find more detailed background information on this exuberant Okanagan winery in our previous posts linked above, I will mention here that I harbour a special appreciation for its primary mission to deliver wines of good value: crushable and tasty, yet with just enough complexity to take them beyond the omnipresent mass-commodity products on many liquor store shelves. These are still wines, ultimately agricultural produce, but you will not find much in the way of rusticity here. I like rustic wines, but I don’t wish to drink them every day. Sometimes it’s nice to sip something that doesn’t taste like soda pop but is still shot through with a certain sunny, carefree joie de vivre. In my prior encounters with them, the wines of Castoro de Oro filled this niche well, coming across varietally correct yet not too dense or serious, aromatically enticing but sporting compact palates that did not require a boatload of cognitive work to decipher. I’m pleased to report that this new round of vintages does little to shift my schema. I was able to meet new vintages of two old friends, but first, a new acquaintance.
NV Castoro de Oro Vidal (~$25)
We begin with a 100% Vidal. I’ve long been intrigued by dry wines made from this hybrid much better known for ice wine production, an offspring of Ugni Blanc (aka Trebbiano Toscano) and the now totally obscure Rayon d’Or, itself a hybrid. This means that Vidal is more vinifera than not, perhaps accounting for its uncanny ability to be cold-hardy while also avoiding the foxy aromas that typically plague varieties with too much American ancestry. Dry Vidal wines tend to be redolent with fruity pineapple and grapefruit aromas, with high acidity. What’s truly curious in this case though is the absence of a vintage! This merits further investigation, but alas, this wine is not currently featured on the Castoro website. Another review references grapes “saved from the ice wine harvest”. Perhaps some of these grapes were picked late one year when a proper ice wine harvest did not seem likely, were vinified, and were then blended with further Vidal grapes picked the following year? Whatever the true origin, I’d be lying if I claimed I wasn’t dead curious to taste the curiosity that is non-vintage dry Vidal. Read the rest of this entry »
The Castoro de Oro estate vineyard was planted in 1980. Located in the esteemed Golden Mile, this site seems engineered by Mother Nature to deliver full ripeness in the grapes, yet not at the expense of acidity. Here we have vines facing southeast to provide ample sunshine, with the grapes also growing on a slope right next to a lake, factors that together work to mitigate any effects of frost. This is all well and good, but too much heat can cause flabby wines that lack precision. Fortunately, a mountain provides evening shade that permits the grapes to cool off during the summer, preserving tartness and resulting in a key balance between acid and ripe fruit flavours. This is particularly important for white wines, for which acidity is the only source of freshness and structure (well… for the most part. Tannins from wine skins and barrels sometimes play a small role).
cabernetdialectic (Raymond Lamontagne)
Dan Steeves
Peter Vetsch
tylerderksen
pop & pour 