Wine Review: 2010 Pheasant’s Tears Kisi

5 09 2012

One of the strangest (and most captivating) bottles you’ll ever try. And it’s orange!

When I interviewed Tim Hendrickson of Wine Ink for last week’s PnP/CIA dual feature, I asked him what was the single weirdest bottle in his unique and eclectic collection of wares, knowing full well that I would likely be buying his response.  The answer was this bottle, the 2010 Kisi from producer Pheasant’s Tears.  What makes it weird?  Well, what doesn’t?  It’s made in Georgia (the country, not the state, although both would be equally weird, I suppose), which is no longer a known winemaking power but is the area of the world with the longest-known history of winemaking, dating back 8000+ years.  It’s a single-varietal wine from a grape, Kisi, that neither I nor the dozens of reference books in my house had ever heard of, a white grape indigenous to the Kakheti province of eastern Georgia, located near the Azerbaijan border.  However, as you can see in the picture at left, the wine is not really white at all, but a rather lurid shade of orange.  And oh yes — it’s fermented and aged by being buried in the ground in a giant clay egg.  Intrigued yet?  Just wait till you taste it. Read the rest of this entry »


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Calgary Wine Life: Meet Tim Hendrickson @ Wine Ink

31 08 2012

[Cross-posted at www.calgaryisawesome.com]

Whether it’s wine or cheese, Tim has you covered.

The first time I met Tim Hendrickson, he was selling me cheese.  In between stints as co-owner of some of Calgary’s most interesting and eclectic wine shops, Hendrickson was the resident cheese guru at Blush Lane Organic Market in Aspen Woods, and every time I saw him it turned into an educational experience about cow vs. sheep vs. goat milk, aging and ripening techniques, the nuances and subtle differences between the products of different countries.  The man straight up knows his cheese, and his knowledge and enthusiasm about his wares led me to try things I never would have picked out for myself.  This earnest desire to serve the customer and teach them new ways to appreciate their favourite indulgences translates seamlessly to his current venture at Wine Ink, where he gets to engage with people about his foremost passion. Read the rest of this entry »


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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: 2010 Kirkland Rutherford Meritage

15 08 2012

Not just wine FROM Costco, wine BY Costco. Too weird.

I had to.  Every time I’ve gone into Costco to grab a bottle or two, my eyes always linger for a moment with morbid curiosity on the various Kirkland bottles for sale.  I can wrap my head around Costco-brand ketchup or Costco-brand paper towel, but I have no idea what to make of Costco-brand wine, particularly since Kirkland (Costco’s proprietary label) keeps spitting out offerings from a vast array of well-to-do regions like Chateauneuf-de-Pape, Champagne, and, as seen here, Napa Valley.  These areas have an established pedigree in the wine world:  this particular bottle comes from Rutherford, arguably Napa’s most prestigious, highest-quality and most expensive sub-region.  Rutherford is a tiny area in the heart of the Valley — when I went to Napa it took about 3 minutes for us to drive from one end of it to the other — and is one of the best places in the world to grow the Cabernet Sauvignon grape, and its name on a label usually signifies that you’re going to be shelling out at least $50-$60 (and often much more) for the privilege of the bottle.  This bottle was $17.  The utter dichotomy in my head between “Rutherford wine” and “produced by Costco” made me have to see what was inside.  One disturbingly inexpensive Napa Cab later, I cracked the Kirkland tonight feeling equal parts anticipation and dread. Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: 2010 Mission Hill Martin’s Lane Riesling

6 08 2012

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

R is for Riesling.

Time to issue the first official correction in PnP history.  When I reviewed Mission Hill’s Reserve-level Riesling back in June, I stated that the Reserve (the 2nd lowest of 4 quality levels of MH wines) was Mission Hill’s top-level Riesling, and I openly pined for the winery to put together a high-end single-vineyard Riesling that would really showcase what my favourite grape could do in Okanagan soil.  I said that if MH ever decided to release such a wine, I would be lining up to try it.  Shortly after posting, I received an e-mail from a representative at the winery that said something like:  “Well, actually, we already DO have a Riesling exactly like that…”, and a week later, this bottle showed up at my door.  In my defence, this particular Riesling doesn’t show up in the official portfolio of wines on the MH website, but as a devoted Riesling disciple, I still feel bad about not being aware of it, and I feel particularly bad about suggesting that it didn’t exist in front of an online audience.

Sorry Mission Hill — time to set the record straight. Read the rest of this entry »


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Calgary Wine Life: The YYC Corkage Primer

25 07 2012

[Cross-posted at www.calgaryisawesome.com]

Time to BYOW, YYC. OK?

Corkage has been a hot topic in Canada recently, thanks to last week’s announcement from the British Columbia government (finally) allowing diners to bring their own bottles of wine into participating BC restaurants.  Here in Alberta, restaurants already have the ability to establish Bring Your Own Wine (BYOW) policies, and many have done so, generally charging a set per-bottle fee (called the corkage fee) in exchange for letting their guests arrive with their vino of choice.  Although this option is widely available in Calgary, it seems like it’s only rarely exercised, as most people either don’t know about the possibility of corkage or would prefer to trust in the carefully-selected wines that a restaurant puts on its own list.  While I usually fall into the latter category, there are certain times — when I have a certain bottle that I’ve been dying to open, when I’ve had a less-than-stellar past wine experience somewhere, or when I want to bring a Wine For An Occasion to celebrate something special — where corkage comes in really handy.  If you’re not sure about how the corkage process works, what the etiquette is around bringing your own bottle, and which places in Calgary offer BYOW service (and for how much), all your answers await below. Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: 2010 Domaines Andre Aubert “Le Devoy”

23 07 2012

There are two compelling reasons why you should track down and drink this wine:

  1. It is a tremendously good value wine that offers depth, intrigue and tons of flavour at a bargain price.
  2. It may give you superpowers.  Or radiation poisoning.  Or both.  It’s tough to predict.

You see, Andre Aubert’s Le Devoy comes from the bucolic Grignan-Les-Adhemar region in France’s Southern Rhone valley.  Before Grignan-Les-Adhemar adopted its almost-impossibly-French appellation name in 2010, it was previously known as the AOC region of Coteaux de Tricastin, named for the French city of Tricastin found within its borders.  Unfortunately for Tricastin, on top of vineyards, it was also home to a series of 4 nuclear reactors, and unfortunately for the nuclear reactors, in 2008 this happened:

Shortly after this questionable incident, a number of employees at the Tricastin plant were exposed to radioactive particles that escaped from a reactor pipe that was supposed to be shut down.  Then a 3 year-old previously-unnoticed nuclear waste leak led to another spill.  Not surprisingly, these terrifying events did little to draw the public towards bottles of wine with “Tricastin” plastered all over their labels, so the growers there petitioned France’s governing wine body to let them change the name of their region, and Grignan-Les-Adhemar (which translates to “Land of the Geiger Counters”) was born.  I have never before heard of a French wine appellation changing its name, especially just so that it could escape from bad PR, but as a result, Le Devoy will now forever be known to me as “nuclear wine”.

But it’s good!  Really!  You should buy it! Read the rest of this entry »


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The Mission Hill Pinot Olympics

17 07 2012

[The bottles below were provided as samples for review purposes.]

As tactfully mentioned by the disclaimer above, I recently received a mixed six-pack of sampler bottles from the good folks at Mission Hill Family Estate winery in the Okanagan Valley.  Two of these bottles, the 2011 Reserve Riesling and the 2011 Five Vineyards Sauvignon Blanc, have received separate PnP review treatment over the past couple of weeks:  see here and here for the full write-ups.  But I couldn’t bring myself to split up the other four bottles and rate them separately, because it was clear that they belonged together, bound as they were by a common provenance:  the family name Pinot.  Pinot Grigio, Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc and Pinot Noir all sat side by side in the MH sample box like a monochromatic grape rainbow, their shared forename a reminder of their common genetic ancestor (Pinots Grigio and Gris are the same grape, and both PG and Pinot Blanc are mutations of Pinot Noir, which is well-known for being genetically unstable).  Since the fortunes of these bottles were clearly tied together, and since it’s July 2012 and our athletes are preparing to head off to London for the Summer Games, I did the only thing I could do and hosted the inaugural Mission Hill Pinot Olympiad at my house over the weekend.

In order: Grigio, Gris, Blanc, Noir. Let the Games begin.

Here’s how our game was played:  I invited over a couple of fellow wine enthusiasts, opened all four bottles of MH Pinot, and we tasted through the lineup and separately ranked each of the wines as against its peers, individually coming up with our gold, silver, bronze, and, um, whatever’s below bronze (lead? aluminum? tungsten?) medal choices.  I then added all of the placements together to come up with a cumulative judges’ score (for example, a wine ranked 1st, 2nd and 3rd by the three different judges would get a total score of 1 + 2 + 3 = 6); the lower the score, the better.  The lowest total score won the overall prize, which basically meant that the bottle was emptied the fastest.  We tasted the wines from whites to red, lightest to heaviest, and my notes below are in the same order.  Who emerged victorious?  Read on! Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Miscellaneous, Wine Reviews

Wine Review: 2011 Kung Fu Girl Riesling

9 07 2012

Best served chilled (as shown by my glass), especially when it’s 30C in Calgary.

New KFG!!  Mid-year is an exciting time for oenophiles, because that’s when many white wines from the previous year’s vintage start appearing on store shelves, and since this particular white is one of my all-time favourite value wines, its release turned an otherwise-mundane outing to Superstore into a cause for celebration.  My love for Kung Fu Girl is partly predicated on my adoration for both Riesling (my all-time favourite grape) and Washington State (one of my go-to wine regions, still criminally underrated despite producing world-class wines) and partly just due to the fact that it’s an awesome bottle of wine for under $20 CDN.  And my excitement obviously not an isolated phenomenon:  my review of last year’s 2010 Kung Fu Girl Riesling is Pop & Pour’s second most popular post of all time, with 2,444 unique views and counting.  I guess when you make something of high quality that doesn’t take itself too seriously and is priced to sell, people pay attention.  Charles Smith, I salute you. Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: 2011 Mission Hill Five Vineyards Sauvignon Blanc

5 07 2012

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

General tip: clear bottle = open soon!

You know it’s officially summer when I can sit outside on my deck and write up a review of a crisp white patio sipper.  The sun is shining, there’s a slight breeze blowing through the trees, and it’s almost-but-not-quite-scorching hot — perfect Sauvignon Blanc weather.  This is the second white I’ve written up recently from the good folks at Mission Hill — I took a look at their Reserve Riesling just over a week ago.   This bottle will be an interesting contrast, because not only are we dealing with a different grape, one with somewhat less of a track record in Canada, but we’re also taking a step down Mission Hill’s quality hierarchy to their introductory level bottlings, which retail for $15ish in Alberta.  The Five Vineyards line of MH wines are sourced from (guess how many) five different estate vineyards scattered across BC’s Okanagan Valley:  Osoyoos and Oliver in the south (just north of the Washington State border), Pinehill and Naramata slightly further north, and the aptly-named Mission Hill Road vineyard surrounding MH’s winery just outside of Kelowna in the northern part of the region.  Each vineyard features differing soils, altitudes and microclimates — Oliver and Osoyoos are near-desert conditions, while the other vineyards along the shoreline of the vast Lake Okanagan, which cools and moderates the growing temperatures — all of which makes it easier to grow grapes with a variety of different characteristics to facilitate the creation of a blended wine that is fairly consistent year over year.  I was surprised to note that the two vineyards that Mission Hill’s website mention specifically for Sauvignon Blanc production are the two hottest ones, Osoyoos and Oliver, although I would guess that some of the grapes in this bottle come from other locations as well. Read the rest of this entry »


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Calgary Wine Life: Meet Jesse Willis @ Vine Arts

29 06 2012

[Cross-posted at www.calgaryisawesome.com]

Calgary, Jesse. Jesse, Calgary.

I walked into the Vine Arts retail space for the first time a couple of weeks ago and, like I do in most wine stores, I looked for the Germany section.  There wasn’t one.  No Riesling section either. Rather than sorting its vinous wares by country or by grape, the more or less universal ways of arranging a wine shop, Vine Arts had catalogued and displayed all its wines by adjective, grouping whites under headings like “Off-Dry & Aromatic” or “Light & Fresh” and reds under headings like “Bold & Structured”, “Spicy Earthy Funky” or, my favourite, “Smooth & Sexy”.  That simple but radical design choice is why I believe Jesse Willis when he tells me he’s trying to do things differently. 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: 2009 Jim Barry “Cover Drive” Cabernet Sauvignon

18 06 2012

The second vintage of Cover Drive featured on PnP…let’s see how they stack up against each other.

I went to the Costco liquor store this week, and as always when I walk into Costco, I walked out with a bottle of the Jim Barry “Cover Drive” Cab from South Australia, one of my favourite New World value wines.  When I first grabbed the bottle, I thought it was the same wine that I had previously reviewed back in November, but on closer inspection it was in fact a brand new vintage of Cover Drive, the 2009 (my reviewed bottle was the 2008).  This provided a golden opportunity to examine a question that I’m sure many casual wine drinkers ask themselves:  how much does vintage impact the flavour and quality of a wine?  Is there really a discernible difference between the 2008 and 2009 bottlings of a wine made from the same grapes grown in the same spots?  Most inexpensive wines are made to reflect a consistent flavour profile and style year over year, but my bet was that a quality producer like Jim Barry wouldn’t try to make his ’09 Cover Drive a clone of his ’08 and would retain some of the vintage variation arising out of the changes in weather patterns, sunlight, temperature, harvest dates and more between the two years.  To find out, I wrote up tasting notes for the 2009 CD without re-reading my 2008 review, and now I’m going to retro-compare the two bottles by lining up my 08 notes side by side with my impressions of the 09.  Hopefully this actually proves interesting.  Here goes! Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: 2010 Villa Maria Marlborough Private Bin Pinot Noir

13 06 2012

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

Marlborough spreads its wings…who needs SB?

This wine is the red corollary to the Villa Maria Sauvignon Blanc I reviewed last week, but (through no fault of the SB, which I quite enjoyed) I found myself much more excited to open this bottle because it was uncharted territory for me.  I (and you, and any other casual-or-more wine drinker) have had the famous Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand’s Marlborough region many times before, but I can count the times I’ve had Marlborough wine made from ANY other grape on one hand…actually, one finger.  I was enthralled by The Doctors’ Riesling by Forrest Wines, a producer daring enough to take Marlborough vineyard land guaranteed to sell with SB and plant something else instead, and I’m doubly intrigued to open my very first red from this sacred Sauvignon Blanc area.  The most famous region in New Zealand for Pinot Noir is probably Central Otago, located in the southern half of NZ’s South Island and known for generating Pinots with distinctive, if potentially off-putting, gamey/meaty/Band-aidy aromas; I had no idea if Marlborough would be more of the same or if it would show off its own individual Pinot style.  No better way to find out… Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: 2011 Villa Maria Marlborough Private Bin Sauvignon Blanc

4 06 2012

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

Cold and young: the best way to enjoy NZ Sauv Blanc.

For my generation of wine drinkers, New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc is a white wine mainstay, both a defining expression of the Sauvignon Blanc grape and one of the first whites that comes to mind during a trip to the wine store.  However, this level of penetration into the world’s vinous consciousness is a very new phenomenon:  NZSB didn’t attract international attention until the mid-1980s, when the bright, crisp, fruit-packed bottlings from the country’s star Marlborough region first took foreign palates by storm.  New Zealand has seen exponential growth in its wine production in the nearly 30 years since, and most of the Sauv Blancs you see on the shelves now are a product of this modern white revolution, only recently arrived to the SB scene.  But not this one.  In 2011, Villa Maria celebrated its 50th year as a producer, which, in a country that is relatively new to the world wine limelight, makes it a true New Zealand pioneer.  Its Private Bin bottling of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc is sourced from grapes grown all over the region and shows that even recent wine history leaves a strong flavour footprint. Read the rest of this entry »


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