Very Special Wines for Celebrations

So, I've finally done it - after 33 years, I have concluded my teaching career.

It feels good.

And it gives me time to focus on wine!

I have a few posts up my sleeve but I'm going to focus on one aspect in this blog entry. My retirement wines.

A little background - I have spent a fair bit of time talking about wines with my colleagues at school over the past year. We have had discussions about wines, how the BC wine industry is progressing, and I have even made several recommendations of wine for a special gift or to pair with a certain meal. Apparently, people were listening because I was given, among other things, four spectacular bottles of wine.  I haven't yet had any of them but I would like to share the different wines and make some comments on them.

The first one is from a local winery in Aldergrove. I've taken a new part-time job working for a wine tour company out of Vancouver (more on that another time) and the Blackwood Lane Winery is one of my favourite stops. The winemaker, Carlos, is of Korean extraction but was born and raised in Peru. He has a wonderful personality and is fascinating to listen to. His philosophy in making wine is to age the wine before it is released, similar to a Spanish Rioja. The wine that was given to me was no exception.

The wine is a 2009 Blackwood Alliance ($69) and is Blackwood Lane's signature Bordeaux style blend. It is a blend of Cab Sauv, Merlot and Cab Franc. I have had a taste of it twice at the winery and it is a rich and complex wine. According to the web site, there are aromas of cherries, raspberries, cassis, violets, oak, stone and cocoa while on the palate are flavours of cherry, raspberry, graphite and cassis.

This is a wonderful wine and I am looking forward to drinking it someday. I will probably put it down for a couple more years as it could handle some extra aging.

The next wine is a Spanish Rioja - another wonderful wine from a part of the world that is becoming recognized as a producer of quality wines.

This is a 2011 Muga Selection Especial Reserva ($43)  and is made from Tempranillo (70%), Garnacha (%20), and the rest Mazuelo (Carignan) and Graciano. Like the Blackwood Lane wine, this wine is aged a considerable amount of time before being released. There needs to be at least three years of aging, one in oak and two in the bottle to receive the reserva designation, but I suspect this one has been aged for two or three years longer. Hopefully, there will be some wonderful black fruit with white pepper and a touch of coffee when I open it up in a year or two.

The third one is a classic Okanagan wine the is always in demand, a Black Hills Nota Bene.

This one is a 2015 Black Hills Nota Bene ($86 according to Vivino - not sure where you could even find it!). It is another Meritage or Bordeaux blend of Cab Sauv, Merlot and Cab Franc. The 2015 growing season started early in the Okanagan and this wine should have really rich and complex flavours when I finally open it in 2022 or so as this wine can age for 10 years.

The last Nota Bene we had was opened when Cait, Dan, Jude, Catherine and I got together to celebrate Cait and Dan's wedding. This is a real special occasion wine.

Finally, a 2005 Cru Bourgeois from Bordeaux - and I'm in heaven!

Imagine, this is already 13 years old!

This is a 2005 Chateau Verdignan Cru Bourgeois from Haut Medoc ($53). A  Cru Bourgeois, as I've said before, has to compete each year to attain that classification and can be as good as some of the 'cru' wines at a much lower price. Haut Medoc is basically 'Upper' Medoc and also contains some of the most famous regions of Bordeaux including Paulliac and Sainte-Estephe.

I think this one will be ready to drink fairly soon....

So there they are - my retirement wines - and I am excited to both taste and age these. How can I do both? Stay tuned....

Ageing Wine - History in the Bottle

As I write this, we've had a wonderful Christmas Eve meal of tourtière and have enjoyed a few different wines over the past couple of days. Christmas is a very special time for us, as in many families, as our adult kids come home, and I tend to bring out some of the special wines to celebrate the occasion.

I was very fortunate to meet by daughter's new dog - christened Nebbiolo! Can you tell that my daughter and her new husband are both in the wine industry? Nebbi is a real cutie and has added to our enjoyment of the holidays.

This holiday, I brought up a few of the wines that we had in the cellar. By cellar, I mean the storage locker in the underground garage which is not ideal but remains a fairly constant temperature with slow fluctuations and is definitely cooler than anywhere else. I rummaged thought the nine boxes that we have stacked up behind the Christmas decorations and took each and every bottle out, assessed whether I thought it was a potential candidate, and put aside eight or nine bottles.

There are a lot of opinions about ageing. My WSET course book stated that most wines do not benefit from ageing - in fact, 99% of wines should be drunk within a couple of years of buying the bottle. Interestingly, many of the Okanagan wineries do, in fact, suggest that ageing will be a great benefit to the wine that you are drinking. Winefolly states that most wines are released within two years of being picked as grapes and should be drunk within six months of being purchased.

I know that when I made wine in my basement from juice so many years ago, I found that having the wine sit in the cellar for twelve to eighteen months after bottling helped a lot - but that isn't really ageing - that just got the wine to that 'release' state. I might have aged one or two bottles an additional year but it was a rare occurrence.

When wine is bought from the store after its release, there is definitely a taste of fruit that is enjoyable and that many people desire from their wine. As a wine ages, the fruit flavour dissipates but there are benefits such as lesser tannins, reduced acidity, and an overall smoothness of flavour.

I had first hand experience with three different wines, all from the Okanagan. They were not all the same age and were not aged the same amount of time but this will hopefully give you some insight on ageing.

The first wine that we had was a Pinot Noir from the Hatch in West Kelowna. We bought it in October of 2016 as part of our first wine club purchase. We had originally signed up for the mixed case but then we spotted something unusual. The Hatch had three different Pinot Noir clones as part of their red wine case. We did a tasting of the wines in the case and immediately changed our order.

The different Pinot Noirs all had the number of the clone such as 767 and 777. The 777 clone was amazing! We absolutely loved it and decided that it would make a great candidate for ageing. It tasted of red fruits and had a complexity that seemed to really call out for a few years in the cellar. Looking at the tasting sheet that accompanied the case, it was suggested that these clones would age until 2019 and beyond.

Then, last summer, I was at the Hatch and I spoke to one of the hatchlings about the clones. He said that the clones should actually be consumed my the end of this year! Thus, it ended up on the special wine list last night.

I clearly remembered the wonderful taste of the 777 a year and a half ago. When I tasted the aged wine last night, I was quite disappointed. It had lost its distinctive fruitiness and really didn't have a lot of character to make up for this. It was rather bland and dull and did not show the expressiveness of the younger version.

It was an unusually blah wine as the Hatch usually has amazing wines. Did I wait too late? Would it have benefitted from even more time in the cellar? Was my storage at fault? Or was it a wine that should have been drunk young? I do not know!

The second wine, also from last night, was a 2013 Hester Creek Terra Unica Cabernet Sauvignon purchased last spring at the Hester Creek Crush Pad Party. I bought five bottles at the time and  I still have 3 bottles of the stuff and thought I'd try one to see how it was coming along.

Hester Creek has a great wine club - you don't have to commit to x bottles every year - you simply purchase your wine and get points for each dollar spend which you can use to buy wines at a later date. You also get to attend special functions like the Crush Pad Party

This wine tasted wonderful! We had it with some juicy steaks from the barbecue and the pairing was great. The tannins had settled down somewhat from the spring and there was a smoothness that was very tasty. It was a wonderful wine that had aged somewhat after a fairly short amount of time. I will definitely continue to age this one and try another bottle next Christmas! Kudos to you, Hester Creek!

The last one was the feature wine for tonight. Way back in (I think) 2012, we went to Black Hills and had a fabulous wine tasting. There were three of us and we split a premium wine tasting (it was around $20 each and they were fine with sharing). The host was called a "Wine Evangelist" and did an awesome job of doing the tasting, He talked about the history of the winery and the wines, which you would expect, but also talked about his own personal sommelier experiences all over the world which really added to the tasting. During that visit, we decided to buy a bottle of their flagship wine, Nota Bene, and save it for a special occasion.

What better special occasion then the marriage of my daughter and my new son-in-law? Even though the wedding was in September, we decided that it just worked better to have our drink today. We decanted the wine and let it breathe for an hour and then poured. 

It was a fantastic wine! It had an earthiness and a richness that was amazing! I don't recall exactly what the Nota Bene tasted like five years ago but I was very please with how it had matured over time. This was truly a wine meant to be aged! I only wish that I had bought more bottles as I think this would continue to improve with age. How long? I'm not sure but I don't think it is at its ageing apex just yet. 

So, after trying three different wines that had been aged to varying degrees, there was one miss, one hit and one that was out of the ballpark. Not a bad ways to kick off the holidays!