Bargain wines offered by Neck of the Woods - and others

Photo: Soaring Eagle Winery om Naramata Road

A week-long case sale of wines at Langley’s Neck of the Woods Winery, which begins March 26, looks like a harbinger of bargain wines for BC consumers.

The winery is offering four varietals – Chardonnay, Gamay, Merlot and Zweigelt - at $99 for a dozen. Consumers can buy mixed cases at the same discount. This works out to just over $8 a bottle.

The winery is also offering a 20% discount on case purchases of any of the other four wines in its tasting room. Plus, there is a six-bottle sampler pack for $69.99.

Coincidentally, that announcement came on the heels of an offer of bargain-priced bulk wines from the Holman Lang group of wineries. The group circulated an email among other wineries, offering a total of 95,970 litres (the equivalent of 10,650 cases) of wine. The wines are selling anywhere between $2 and $7 a litre.

This is not an offer to consumers directly. The 21 wines are not yet bottled. Other wineries have begun to take up some of the offer, likely to blend the wines with their own budget brands.

It is not unusual to see wineries selling some wines in bulk, either to move surplus wines or to move wines that are left over when the main blends are done. Another premium Okanagan winery is currently selling a modest amount of red wine (Syrah and a Bordeaux blend) that is surplus to its planned production from the 2009 vintage.

The volume offered by the seven-winery Holman Lang group is a larger than the usual bulk offer seen in the Okanagan. It is perhaps a sign of the softer market for domestic wine during the last year.

Thanks to the slowdown in the economy which began in 2008, many BC wineries have had to get creative to keep their wines moving and not clogging up their warehouses.

It does not help that the economy slowed down just as recently planted vineyards have begun to produce.

Bill Collings, a grower at Okanagan Falls, has produced an interesting analysis of grape production trends in the current newsletter of the British Columbia Amateur Winemakers Association.

In 2008 the grape harvest was estimated to be 20,000 tons. “That translates to about 12 million litres of wine,” he writes.

The 2009 grape harvest dropped by 20% due to killing frosts in the previous winter. Collings estimates that the 2009 wine production was 9,600,000 litres – “yet some wineries had sales problems.”

He estimates that if the 9,500 acres of vines now planted in BC achieve full production, there will be enough grapes for between 17 million and 23 million litres. “If wineries have sales problems with short tonnages,” he warns, [selling the wines from] “projected full tonnage could be seriously problematic. … Our industry could be in for a serious shakeup if the economy does not recover quickly [while] our acreage comes into full production.”

Many established producers have already responded by rolling back some wine prices, by releasing new lines of value-priced wines and by exporting to markets that were being ignored when BC consumers were drinking almost all BC wines. These strategies are serving the established wineries well.

But this is a tough market for wineries that have not been around that long and have just started to build followings.

That seems to explain the bargain offerings from Neck of the Woods and from the Holman Lang group.

With the significant exception of Lang Vineyards (opened 1990), the other Holman Lang wineries have been open for less than 10 years: Stonehill (2001), Spiller (2003), Mistral (2005), Soaring Eagle (2007), K Mountain and Zero Balance (2008). That is hardly enough time to establish strong consumer and restaurant followings. That’s why there is 10,000 cases of wine that is not even bottled.

Neck of the Woods also has an identity issue. The winery, on 232nd Street in Langley, opened in 2002 as Glenugie Winery. After the death of founder Gary Tayler, it was purchased in 2008 by Ewen Stewart, a Whiterock developer with a real estate project and another winery project in Abbottsford.

With the help of a marketing consultant, the Glenugie name was replaced – not once, but twice. The Neck of the Woods label only appeared last fall. The winery needs to build traffic at its Langley location and bargain wine prices are the tried and true way of doing that.

Thus may be a tough time to be in the wine business but it is a good time to be a consumer.

Bold or batty? Road 13 switches to blends from varietals

Photos: Road 13 winery (top) Michael Bartier (bottom)

In a daring move that their peers might even called foolhardy, Road 13 Vineyards has decided to phase out several of its major varietals and to switch to releasing blends.

Out: Riesling, Chardonnay, Syrah, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon.

In: Stemwinder (a white blend) and Rockpile (a red blend). These join the winery’s other blends, Fifth Element (red), Honest John’s White and Honest John’s Red.

The rationale? Here is what winemaker Michael Bartier said in a news release: “It is a bold and risky move to stop the production of some of our most popular wines but we are sacrificing them for a higher cause – even better wines. … Don’t get me wrong, I love Chardonnay and I love Sauvignon Blanc. I just happen to love them more when they are put together.”

He is right. Time will tell whether the consumers are ready for this.

Blends, in fact, are in the best tradition of wine. The producers of Bordeaux, as an example, have been blending varietals for centuries in the knowledge that the whole is better than the parts. Europe’s traditional producers (with the significant exception of German Riesling producers) have always released wines with labels naming the site or the appellation and never the varietals.

It was the New World – notably California, Australia and Chile – that educated their consumers with the varietal on the label, not the site. They were so effective that the French over the last decade, and even the Italians, began releasing named varietals as well. Consumers had been trained to want to know what grapes they were drinking, not where the wine came from.

New world winemakers knew, of course, that they were sacrificing quality sometimes by not blending, so they quietly did a little blending. In the United States and in British Columbia), a named varietal need contain only 85% of that variety. That gives the winemaker the chance to blend in up to 15% of something else if it improves the wine (as it usually does).

Road 13 is saying: why be just a little pregnant?

Stemwinder, to be released April 1 at $21.99, is a blend of Chardonnay, Chardonnay Musqué, and Sauvignon Blanc. (Stemwinder is the name of the soil in Road 13’s Home Vineyard.)

Rockpile (named for the vineyard) will be released April 1 at $24.99. It is a blend of Syrah, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, with a touch of Viognier.

“We think that BC wine drinkers are more than ready to look beyond varietal names as a purchasing guideline,” Bartier says. “By blending, we are putting our best efforts forward.”

He also makes the point that “blending is how you get wines to represent their place, rather than trying to make another ‘Old World’ style Riesling or another ‘New World’ style Syrah.

The winery is sacrificing some of its most popular varietals, notably its Merlot. “Yes, it is a martyred wine,” Bartier says. “This is not about Merlot – it’s about the Okanagan. Wine that tastes like the Okanagan ….”

Bartier is arguably one of the best blenders in the Okanagan. Now we will find out whether the consumers will embrace his skill or default to a safe varietal.

The wines:

Road 13 Rockpile 2008 ($24.99). The winery has released 4,500 cases of this blend, around a quarter of Road 13's entire production, so the wine had better be good! And it is. Dark in colour, it begins with aromas of vanilla, mocha and red fruit. On the palate, there are flavours of plum and mocha lifted with a hint of pepper (this is after all a 60% Syrah wine). It is full on the palate, with long, ripe tannins, and it has a lingering finish. The blend, in addition to Syrah, is 19% Merlot, 10% Cabernet Sauvignon, 6% Cabernet Franc, 2% Zinfandel, and 1% each of Viognier, Mourvedre and Grenache. 90-91.

Road 13 Stemwinder 2009 ($21.99). The winery has released 1,837 cases of this wine, an unusual blend of 60% Chardonnay, 32% Sauvignon Blanc and 8% Chardonnay Musque. The wine begins with subtle aromatics (banana, canteloupe, herbs) and delivers flavours of melon and tangerine. The texture is soft (perhaps a touch too soft) but the impression is that this is a delicious wine and tastes like more. 89.

Eliminating varietals creates a bit of a challenge to those competitive-minded tasters who like to line up several wines side by side and see how they compare. I'd suggest tasting the Stemwinder along side Tinhorn Creek Oldfield's Selection White, Blasted Church's Hatfield's Fuse, Joiefarm's A Noble Blend and Stoneboat's Chorus. Rockpile might be tasted against Mission Hill's Quatrain or Fork in the Road Oliver Block 249 Red.

Cherry Point Estate Wines has new owners

A wine-loving economist from Colombia, Xavier Bonilla, has taken over as the new owner of Cherry Point Vineyards, one of the stalwarts of Cowichan Valley wine production.

One of his first moves has been to rename it as Cherry Point Estate Wines, to underline a commitment to making only estate-grown wines.

The only exception might be Cherry Point’s legendary blackberry wine. Traditionally, this has been made from wild berries purchased from freelance pickers. However, the government has required the winery to plant two acres of blackberries. This so that Cherry Point (and others making blackberry wines) complies with a regulatory requirement under the land-based winery license rules of growing some of its own raw material (however stupid it is to force anyone to plant more of an invasive species that would take over Vancouver Island if allowed).

Cherry Point was opened in 1994 by Wayne and Helena Ulrich. When they retired 10 years later, they sold the winery to the Cowichan Indian Band. The band had been motivated by the Osoyoos Indian Band’s success with Nk’Mip Cellars, the first Aboriginal-owned winery in North America.

Perhaps because the Cowichan had not, unlike Nk’Mip, partnered with a major wine producer and marketer, Cherry Point has not experienced Nk’Mip’s success in sales. Last fall, after running it for five years, the Cowichan put the winery on the market.

Bonilla, as it happens, had tried to buy Cherry Point five years ago but those negotiations fell through. He and his wife, Maria, were thinking of returning to Colombia last fall when Cherry Point came on the market again. “I said, let’s go, this is what I have wanted all my life,” says Bonilla, who was born in 1947.

He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin with a master’s degree in agriculture. He has worked as an agricultural economist for three Colombian presidents while also operating a 50-head dairy farm an hour outside Bogota.

Over the years, he became increasingly interested in wine, acquiring a good knowledge of Spanish wines during several trips to European vineyards. He even canvassed some potential vineyard sites in Colombia and Ecuador.

However, in 2000 Bonilla and his wife, trained as a translator, moved to Vancouver so that their two children could enrol at the University of British Columbia.

To put bread on the table, as he puts it, he went into business for himself in West Vancouver, first with a professional lawn care franchise, then a coffee-roasting business and finally a restaurant. As each business succeeded, he accepted offers to sell them. With their children almost done at university, the Bonillas would likely have returned to Colombia (they still have a house there) if Cherry Point has not come along last fall.

Bonilla and his new winemaker, Australian-trained Dean Canadzich, are not shaking up the Cherry Point portfolio but plan to continue producing the eight or so wines made from the 12 varietals grown in the 19-acre vineyard.

“We make fantastic blends,” Bonilla believes. “I think the magic of good winemaking is blending. That’s what I learned in Europe. Nobody cares what grape it is. They want to know which land it comes from. You really taste the flavour of the land at Cherry Point. With our Pinot Noir you get this prunish flavour on the finish which is unique to this land.”

In addition to Pinot Noir, the vineyard grows Ortega, Pinot Gris, Siegerrebe, a little Gewürztraminer, Agria and Castel, among others. Some underperforming vineyard blocks are being replanted with two new Swiss-developed hybrids: an aromatic white called Epicure and a red called Petit Milo.

One possible change in style will involve the blackberry wine. Currently, Cherry Point offers Cowichan Blackberry and Solera Blackberry. Both are port-style wines. The Solera is a blend of several vintages from a succession of barrels in the time-honoured solera method of sherry-making. Bonilla is considering using the solera process for all of Cherry Point’s blackberry wine.

Using her experience from their West Vancouver restaurant, Maria Bonilla has taken over Cherry Point’s Bistro. A popular wedding venue and a favourite stop for wine tourists, the bistro was launched by the winery’s original owners and expanded by the Cowichan. It has proven one of the winery’s strongest connections with the community.

“What I liked about Cherry Point was its commitment to the community,” Bonilla says. “The community feels a part of the ownership here and I like that.”

Hester Creek is joining the 90 point circle

An individual at Hester Creek Estate Winery recently posed to me an exasperated question: “Don’t Hester Creek’s wine deserve 90 points yet?”

The question was not directed at my reviews but rather at the general attitude toward Hester Creek in the wine writing community.

Well, after tasting the winery’s current three reserve reds, I agree that it is time we revised our attitude. Hester Creek is finally realizing the potential of its great vineyard site on the Golden Mile south of Oliver. Since being taken over in 2004 by Prince George businessman Curt Garland, the winery has emerged from its turbulent history. It is now poised as a winery to be reckoned with for wines that are top quality but not over-priced, a sometimes elusive combination in the Okanagan.

The potential of the site was first grasped by Joe Busnardo, an Italian immigrant who began growing vinifera grapes here in 1968. Hardly anybody was growing vinifera at the time. The wineries refused to pay Joe a premium for vinifera and then eventually forced him to open Divino Estate Winery in 1983, giving himself a home for his grapes.

He sold the winery in 1996, relocating Divino to the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island.

The new owners, including winemaker Frank Supernak, renamed the winery Hester Creek, after a creek flowing beside the property. The creek, in turn, was named after Hester Haynes, whose father was a pioneer judge and rancher in the south Okanagan. Legend has it that she like to swim in the creek.

Under its current ownership, Hester Creek has celebrated that connection with a pioneer family (Hester White, as she became, lived until 1963.) The new Hester Creek label includes the logo of a female swimmer and some back labels recite this bit of history.

Frank Supernak and his partners did a great deal to wrestle the 75-acre vineyard and the rustic winery into shape over six years. However, they were undercapitalized. Frank finally left in the summer of 2002 because he was unhappy with the way Hester Creek was being run. (He died that November in an accident in another winery.)

He apparently had reason for being unhappy. Hester Creek slide into receivership and Garland acquired the winery for about $5 million in a court auction. The tumult did not do much good for the winery’s reputation.

Garland, who has probably spent another $5 million on Hester Creek since buying it, has made all the right moves to turn around the wines and the reputation. In 2006 he hired a winemaker from Ontario, Robert Summers, whose nearly two decades of experience included several years as national winemaker for Andrew Peller Ltd.

And he has given Summers the tools to make good wine, including a modern 35,000-case winery to replace the original Divino winery. It was a rickety affair, lacking hot water or safe electrical wiring. (One former winemaker complained about getting shocks.) The new winery is full of state of the art equipment – and it has an expansive new tasting room capable of swallowing up the crowds without feeling crowded.

Some of the most important investments have been in the vineyard. Drip irrigation has replaced overhead sprinklers. Malbec, Petit Verdot and Syrah were planted in 2005, along with a good block of Chardonnay. In 2007 and 2008, a 22,000-vine block of Pinot Gris was added.

These are in addition to the varieties already grown there, including Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Pinot Blanc and Trebbiano planted before 1975. Having such old vines can be a considerable advantage in the production of quality wines.

The current Reserve wines represent, in a sense, transition wines. The 2005 vintage was in the winery’s barrels when Summers arrived in June, 2006 but he finished the vintage brilliantly. The vintages from 2006 through 2008 were made in the old winery, although with the benefit of new fermenters and barrels.

The quality of those reserve wines should create a lot of excitement about future Hester Creek releases, a rising number of which should be in the 90 plus range.

Here are my notes:

Hester Creek 2006 Reserve Cabernet Franc ($26.05). Joe Busnardo planted well when he chose this variety as flagship red for the vineyard. The winery now has almost 14,000 Cabernet Franc vines, half of them planted before 1970. My guess is that those old vines produced the 460 cases of this reserve wine. It begins with an alluring aroma of spices, red berries and vanilla. The brambleberry flavours are nicely integrated with the oak. The long ripe tannins give the wine a satisfying fullness. 88-90.

Hester Creek 2005 Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon ($35.09). Only 300 cases of this have been released. An elegant red, it has had its tannins polished with good barrel and bottle aging. As a result, the texture is subtle. The wine has flavours of vanilla, plum, chocolate and coffee. 88-89

Hester Creek 2006 Reserve Merlot ($26.05). This delicious wine, of which 850 cases has been released, is definitely made from some of the pre-1975 Merlot in the vineyard. The wine presents itself with alluring berry aromas and a tasty scoop of sweet berry fruit on the palate. It has a rich juicy and yet concentrated texture and a satisfying finish. 90

CedarCreek and Holman Lang both lose winemakers

Photos: Tom DiBello (top) and Bernhard Schirrmeister (bottom)


In a surprising coincidence, two senior Okanagan winemakers have stepped down at the same time.

CedarCreek Estate Winery announced the departure of Tom DiBello, the senior winemaker there for 10 years.

Concurrently, Bernhard Schirrmeister announced that he is no longer associated with the Holman Lang group of wineries.

The tone of both announcements leads one to think that neither departure was exactly friendly.

CedarCreek’s statement said that DiBello was “leaving to pursue other oenological opportunities.”

DiBello, who resigned, is setting up his own consulting company in the Okanagan. He has already been retained by four wineries.

In his announcement, Schirrmeister said only: “Due to changes at Holman Lang Wineries, I’m no longer responsible for their winemaking.” Neither he nor Holman Lang elaborated.

At CedarCreek, president Gordon Fitzpatrick said that the winery has begun the search for a successor to DiBello. In the meantime, assistant winemaker Bill Pierson is running the cellar.

“Tom has been a big part of our success and we would like to thank him for his many contributions to crafting quality wines on behalf of CedarCreek,” Fitzpatrick added.

Tom has one of the more impressive résumés in Okanagan winemaking. In the past decade, CedarCreek has been Canada’s winery of the year twice in a major national wine competition. His peers regard him as a master with both Pinot Noir and with Bordeaux grape varieties. And everybody thinks that, under his hand, CedarCreek’s Ehrenfelser became arguably the world’s best Ehrenfelser.

This is from a man who grew up surfing in Newport Beach and vacillated between medicine and business before enrolling in the wine program at the University of California in Davis.

Most Davis winemaking students get hands-on experience during their studies by working at a producing winery during vintage. DiBello was assigned to one of Napa’s top wineries, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. Its owner, Warren Winiarski, has been renowned ever since his wines outscored top Bordeaux wines during at a 1976 Paris tasting.

“Warren Winiarski is a tough taskmaster,” DiBello discovered when he returned there after graduation in 1983. “He’s a demanding perfectionist.” DiBello rose to become director of cellar operations, effectively the assistant winemaker, before going to Australia in 1987 where he had the pick among several choice winemaker jobs. He went to Cape Mentelle, a highly-regarded producer at Margaret River in Western Australia. “It’s right on the beach,” DiBello told me. “Margaret River has one of the best surfing beaches in the world and that’s what I looked on from my house there.”

He came back to California a year later (for economic and romantic reasons) and spent two years as a wine salesman. In 1989 he joined a small new winery at Temecula in southern California, Clos de Muriel, which won medals for its wines but was under-financed and closed after the 1992 vintage.

He went from there to do a vintage in Virginia and then spent four years with a winery in Arizona. In 1996 he joined Claar Cellars, a new Washington State winery. He made two vintages there and another two at a winery called Washington Hills before being recruited by CedarCreek. He came to the Okanagan in the summer of 2000.

Tom's current plan is to remain in the Okanagan which he has come to regard as one of the best places in the world for growing top quality wine. It would not be surprising, however, if he were soon wooed by wineries on the American west coast. If he now returns to the United States, it will be a big loss for Canadian winemaking.

Bernhard Schirrmeister was born in Germany in 1965 and trained at Geisenheim. He gained extensive winery experience there with large and small producers and with sparkling wine, Riesling and Pinot Noir.

He became aware of the Okanagan during a vacation to the valley and was recruited by Günther Lang to take over winemaking at Lang Vineyards when Ross Mirko went to New Zealand in 2005. Shortly after, Keith Holman bought Lang Vineyards (Günther has now retired from the wine business).

The winemaking task at Holman Lang has expanded considerably over the five years. The group’s seven wineries now include Lang, Soaring Eagle, Zero Balance, Spiller, Mistral, Stonegate and K Mountain. Of these, only Stonegate (which is being sold) has its own winemaker.

Both of these men leave big shoes to fill.

Nk'Mip Cellars is like a family for Lindsay Anderson

Photos: Lindsay Anderson of Nk'Mip Cellars and totem pole at Four Host Nations Pavilion

Lindsay Anderson suffered heat stroke twice during her first wine industry job when she work in the Vincor vineyards near Osoyoos.

In spite of that initiation, she has become deeply involved. She has taken every wine industry course offered by Okanagan College and she is one of the guest services managers at the Nk’Mip Cellars winery.

During the 2010 Olympics, she has also taken a turn at the Four Host Nations Pavilion which has Nk’Mip Merlot and Chardonnay in its restaurant. Diners there may not fully appreciate how much First Nations history there is in each glass.

Lindsay is member of the Osoyoos Indian Band which operates Nk’Mip Cellars in partnership with Vincor. Nk’Mip was North America’s first aboriginal winery. “Nk’Mip is something that all of our band members are proud of,” Lindsay says.

In my judgment, everyone associated with the British Columbia wine industry takes pride in Nk’Mip’s winemaking accomplishments as well as in the Band’s overall contribution to B.C. wine growing.

The involvement began with the establishment of Inkameep Vineyards at Oliver in 1968. It grew in 1980 when the Band built the building which T.G. Bright & Co. leased for the winery that has become Jackson-Triggs at Oliver. Producing alcoholic beverages on a First Nations reserve was very contentious at first but Sam Baptiste, the band chief at the time, toughed out the criticism. He believed, correctly, that the winery would provide steady and well-paying careers for Band members.

Subsequently, the entrepreneurial Band launched a number of other businesses on the reserve. However, Clarence Louie, the current chief, told me (before Nk’Mip winery opened) that the Jackson-Triggs winery jobs were still among the best career choices.

The Band contributed in a major way to the success of Jackson-Triggs when, in the late 1990s, it leased to the winery the hundreds of acres of sagebrush that now grow the best grapes in the south Okanagan.

The Nk’Mip winery at Osoyoos was developed in 2000 as an anchor for a resort and condominium project after the Band’s original idea, a casino, failed to win government approval. No doubt, the Band would have succeeded with the casino but, unlike the winery, it would hardly have been a brilliant North American first.

Vincor was engaged as a 50% partner because of its technical resources and its marketing ability. Nk’Mip is making about 18,000 cases a year (its maximum capacity) and Vincor is selling it all within Canada.

Vincor also set up a mentoring structure. Winemaker Randy Picton has two winemaking assistants who are First Nations. One is just graduating from Lincoln University in New Zealand and the other is about to enrol there.

Lindsay Anderson, who was born in Vernon, worked in various other Band businesses as a teenager before becoming one of the early employees at Nk’Mip. “It is a place where I can continue to keep learning,” she says.

In addition to working in vineyards, Lindsay also spent six months in the laboratory at the Jackson-Triggs winery, becoming adept enough in the job to pursue that side of wine. “They tried to keep me,” she recalls, “But I wanted to go back to Nk’Mip. It’s a lot like a family. We’ve really gotten close.”

She likes leading winery VIP tours, along with all of the other tasks involved in hospitality at what is one of the Okanagan’s busiest tasting rooms. Her vineyard and her laboratory experience have equipped her to answer most questions that wine tourists are likely to ask.

Even the naïve questions: more than once, she has been asked whether Band members have any ceremonies to “bless” the grapes. No, they don’t. They leave it to Mother Nature.

Does she have a favourite wine? “When I started at Nk’Mip, I didn’t drink wine,” she says. “But I immediately fell in love with Chardonnay.”

Her current favourites are the winery’s Qwam Qwmt Chardonnay and the Qwam Qwmt Syrah. (Qwam Qwmt is the winery’s premium label.)

I’d say she’s developed a pretty good palate.

Le Clos Jordanne's wines come to B.C.

Photo: Thomas Bachelder in Vancouver


In British Columbia, Ontario wines don’t get the respect they deserve. Perhaps it is a chicken and egg scenario: the best Ontario wines are seldom available on the west coast.

There are several reasons for that, aside from the usual tit for tat one (the best of British Columbia, until recently, has seldom been offered in Ontario either).

One: the liquor boards get in the way. Even in this age when you can buy almost anything over the Internet, wineries are not permitted to ship directly to customers in other provinces. The liquor boards, who want to collect their mark-ups, might just lift the licenses of any direct-selling wineries.

Two: the top wines are usually in limited supply. If a winery can sell out in its home province, why bother with exports to another? This has begun to change, however, as new vineyards come into production and more wine is available.

And that is why Ontario’s Le Clos Jordanne has recently begun to offer its elegant Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays to restaurants and private and government wine stores in British Columbia. These are among the finest wines currently being made in Ontario.

Le Clos Jordanne was launched in 2000 as a joint venture between Vincor and the giant Boisset group of Burgundy in France.

This was about the same time that Vincor and Bordeaux’s Group Taillan established the Osoyoos Larose joint venture winery in the Okanagan. In both instances, Vincor’s former chief executive, Don Triggs, invited two leading French producers to lend their expertise to raising the bar in Canada.

The Burgundy connection began in the early 1990s when Inniskillin (which was about to become part of Vincor) enlisted Jaffelin, one of the Boisset wineries, in a project to make a Pinot Noir in Ontario called Alliance. The wine was impressive enough that Boisset agreed a few years later to provide some advice on Pinot Noir terroir in Ontario and then to partner in Le Clos Jordanne.

The winery is so named because it and its vineyards are near the village of Jordan. The spelling of Jordan had to be tweaked because of trademark issues with wineries in Napa and in South Africa already called Jordan. Ironically, there once was a Jordan winery in Ontario but, no doubt, the trademark had lapsed before Vincor absorbed the remnants.

Jean-Charles Boisset says that his father, Jean-Claude, had briefly considered planting vines in Ontario just after World War II. When Jean-Charles tramped vineyard land near Jordan with Don Triggs, he was struck by how Burgundian the terroir was.

“We had a blank slate,” he recalls. The partners bought about 150 acres in three parcels on the Jordan Bench, imported French vines and planted the land between 2000 and 2002. There are seven clones of Pinot Noir, three clones of Chardonnay and a small block of Pinot Gris. Why Pinot Gris? Apparently, the clever Burgundian monks used to plant that variety centuries ago, blending it small quantities with Chardonnay in cool years and with Pinot Noir in hot years. The vineyard is farmed organically, with a nod to biodynamic principles as well.

To make the wine, Le Clos hired Quebec-born Thomas Bachelder, a former wine writer who decided in the early 1990s to become a winemaker. He worked in both Burgundy and Oregon, got a winemaking diploma in Beaune, and had a decade of experience by the time he joined Le Clos in 2003.

He is one of the most intensely focussed winemakers in Ontario. “Pinot Noir and Chardonnay … are my working lifeblood, my passion, my avocation,” he is quoted in Le Clos’s literature. “I simply don’t want to do anything else.”

The wines have been very well received. At a big Montreal tasting last year that pitted Le Clos wines against international wines, a Le Clos Chardonnay was judged best in the tasting.

Late in January, he presided at the first Vancouver tasting of his wines, primarily to an audience of restaurateurs and wine store buyers. Safe to say, it was an eye-opener on Ontario wines for most people.

Here are my notes.

Talon Ridge Village Reserve Chardonnay 2006 ($35-$40). Elegant and well-balanced, with aromas and flavours of citrus and tropical fruits and with refreshing tang on the finish. 90.

Claystone Terrace Vineyard Chardonnay 2006 ($40-$45). This vineyard delivers a wine with richer aromas and flavours – citrus, apricot, spice, toast. The wine is beautifully focussed and complex, in the style of a finessed white Burgundy. 92-94.

Le Clos Jordanne Vineyard Chardonnay 2006 ($40-$45). Another complex white, with a touch of truffles along with the aromas and flavours of citrus fruits and a backbone of minerals and acidity. 92.

Le Grand Clos Chardonnay 2006 ($55-$65). Compared with the previous three, this wine just has a bit more of everything. The aromas and flavours are more concentrated and the structure will support cellaring this wine. 95.

Talon Ridge Village Reserve Pinot Noir 2006 ($35-$40). A lovely red, with aromas and flavours that reminded me both of cherries and of a very fine marmalade. Those flavours were somewhat unexpected but so very tasty. 90.

La Petite Vineyard Pinot Noir 2006 ($40-45). Even the vineyard name suggests it. This is a delicate feminine wine with a floral perfume on the nose, cherry flavours and a sensual texture. 92.

Claystone Terrace Vineyard Pinot Noir 2006 ($40-$45). This is a full-bodied, even gamey Pinot with a touch of black cherry and chocolate and a rich palate feel. 92-94.

Le Grand Clos Pinot Noir 2006 ($60-$70). This is an appealing, cerebral Pinot with spectacular elegance. The aroma is restrained … but this is still a very young Pinot that will be drinking well for many years. At this stage, the fruit flavours are sweet cherries and other red berries. A wonderful wine. 95.