Vertical Tasting - Drink Up!

A little over a year ago, I participated in my first vertical tasting, ever. I was at Hester Creek for their first Crush Party and, on the Cellar Tour, we were given the opportunity to try out three different vintages of their flagship blend, The Judge. I loved tasting the differences between the different vintages/ You can read more about it here but the reason I mention it is because I recently got the chance to try another vertical tasting, but on my own terms!

Recently, I was in Kelowna visiting with my daughter and son-in-law (who both work for wineries in the Okanagan). My son-in-law, Dan, is an expert sommelier and has a wonderful wine collection that he and my daughter are very generous to share whenever we visit. On the last night of our recent visit, he suggested that we do a vertical tasting - and it was a very memorable time!

First of all, to do a vertical tasting, it is probably a good idea to have three wines. It's much more fun to go back and forth between the different vintages.

The second thing you need is enough wine glasses so that everyone can have all of the wines in front of them. When we went to Hester Creek last year, we used the same glass so you only had your memory to go by when comparing. With 9 glasses laid out, the three of us were free to go back and forth between the different vintages.

The Coravin in action

The final thing is not necessary but, if you don't want to polish off all of the wine that night, a really good wine extraction system is ideal. Dan has the Coravin which is one that is proven to work well for preserving - maybe not forever but certainly for a several months at least.  Lots of tests have been done on coravined bottles and wine will last upwards of a year. The Coravin works like this - a thin needle goes through the cork of the bottle and allows wine to go out of the bottle while you pump argon into the bottle (thus avoiding oxygenation). The needle comes out and, when you're done, the cork self-seals, and you put what's left in the cellar.

The wines we tasted were all Quail's Gate 'The Boswell" Syrah. There was a 2013, a 2014, and 2015. The list price on all of them is $54.99 but I am not sure if you are actually able to get all of them anymore. Dan collected them over the last couple of years.

Three vintages of Quail's Gate 'The Boswell' Syrah

The 2013 was, at first, a little understated. However, this is the advantage of having three glasses sitting in front of you. Each time I came back to it, the taste and nose was better and better. This wine was a touch garnet on the edges in colour. On the nose was a bit of pepper and fruit and some complex earthy smells that were really interesting. On the palate, there was more of the earthy(almost barnyard) and even mineral flavours with some dark plum as well as an almost meaty flavour that I had a hard time discerning (thanks, Dan!). It was incredible how it opened up as we swirled and sipped (but no spitting with this wine!). Definitely one to decant for an hour or so before drinking!  It also had a great long finish. A wonderful wine!

The 2014, at first, seemed very good compared to my initial taste of the 2013. This, however, started to change as time went on. It had lost it's fruitiness (that the 2015 had) but had not yet fully developed the earthy flavours of the 2013. Sometimes, when you lay down a wine, it has a time where it is transitioning and does not quite taste like a fresh, new wine nor does it quite taste like an earthy, complex classic.  After going back to the 2014 several times, this wine tasted like it was on the road to developing some complex, earthy flavours but was not quite there yet. Still a very good wine, but one that was sort of stuck in the middle. Luckily, thanks to the Coravin, Dan put the rest of the wine back in the cellar for, hopefully, another six to twelve months.

The 2015 was a very nice wine. Although it had fairly strong tannins, thanks to its youth, the black fruits like black plums and black currants were very strong on the nose as well as the palate along with black cherries and pepper. It also had some really nice complexity - you can tell that this wine will be a fantastic, complex wine, comparable to the 2013. I would definitely put this one in the cellar for two to three years - but it was still complex and interesting enough to drink right away.

It was an amazing experience to try these fantastic Okanagan wines. It is incredible to actually smell and taste how different these wines were, even though they were from the same grape - the same vineyard, in fact - but just differed by year. To top it off, after our tasting there was still a half a bottle left in each one which was resealed thanks to the Coravin, waiting for some other wine aficionados to try them out.

Reorganizing the wines in my cellar

It also prompted me to go through my wine cellar. I now have seven cases of assorted wines that I am ageing and my previous method of organization was to go down to the cellar, open up every box, look at every bottle, and decide to bring 6 or 8 bottles up. My new organization required me to bring every box and wine bottle up, take photos of them all, enter them in Vivino, note which box each wine was in, and export the cellar info from Vivino to an Excel spreadsheet. Now I can sort all of the wines by year, winery, varietal, etc. so that I can see if I have wines that could be candidates for a vertical tasting. Lo and behold, I have bottles of Tinhorn Creek Oldfield Syrah from 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014!

All I need is a Coravin!