A fun and irreverent wine blog focusing on wine from all over the world. WSET-2 w/Distinction. Also features vacation reports, thoughts about movies and anything else I want to talk about.
Ah, COVID-19. You are, for lack of a more eloquent phrase, a royal pain in the ass.
As we slowly open up our businesses and try to get out of the house a little more, it’s natural to want to get back to some of the things that bring us pleasure. For my wife and I, one thing at the top of our list is getting together with our good friends and hitting up some wineries, whether those be local or up in the Okanagan. Here’s the catch, and it’s a big one: Neither of us is likely to survive COVID-19. So……to say we have to be very careful is an understatement.
My wife has a pre-existing medical condition (asthma) AND an auto-immune disease. I have severe sleep apnea, which was just announced in a study to be a serious contributor to death from COVID-19. It wouldn’t make me more likely to GET the virus, but if I get it, I’m in real trouble. My wife would be at high risk to get the virus, since her immune system is basically non-existent, and if she gets it, well…….not a good thing.
So, for the most part, we are quarantined. When we do go out, we are very careful, and we will have to continue to be so until this virus is wiped out or a vaccine is available.
Does that mean we can’t do anything fun? No, it’s just a question of choosing the right activities. A walk with the dog along the river, enjoying a scenic drive, a picnic in an uncrowded park, or, as I took in yesterday, a wine tasting.
BC’s Provincial Health Officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, has called the risk of transmitting COVID-19 outdoors “negligible” and “infinitesimally small”. A recent study of cases in China found a total of ONE outbreak (which caused two cases) linked to outdoor transmission. Although there is little doubt that we don’t know everything about this virus yet, it seems as if enjoying the outdoors, as long as you take some elementary precautions, is very safe.
One of our very good friends lost her job due to COVID, as did I, so we decided it was a great opportunity to head out to the newly-reopened Glass House Estate Winery in Langley. It is about a 40-minute drive from my place, and only about 15 minutes for her. We decided it would be safest to go during a weekday, to minimize the number of guests that we might have to interact with. Oh, and it was somewhat satisfying to go wine tasting while our spouses were working, to earn the money to pay for the wine we were about to buy 🙂
Unlike a lot of wineries open in the Okanagan, they are not currently taking reservations; but we know someone there, and they knew we were coming and what time we would be there. They are in an excellent position for “pandemic tasting”, in that their space is huge. If you want to do a typical wine tasting, they have a large indoor area and tasting bar. If, like us, you want more than that, they have a patio with 8-10 tables, well spaced apart. And, if that’s not enough, they have a large open grassy area with a bunch of picnic tables, where you can take some wine and have yourself a little picnic. They currently have a small “shared plates” menu, but they are expanding that to include burgers and the like in the near future.
We were seated at the end of the patio, nowhere near the other guests. Our servers all wore masks and gloves whenever they were near anyone. We never felt unsafe for even a second.
Charcuterie board, $29. Delicious.
Let’s get to the wine!
It’s a real treat to have a winery producing wines of this quality less than an hour away from Chilliwack. When my wife has some time off, I’ll take her for a tasting and I know that we will both feel perfectly safe. I will investigate the other Fraser Valley wineries as well and see which ones can accommodate outdoor tastings.
Next up? More random stuff that I’ve been drinking this week, including a bunch of Okanagan wine. Stay tuned!
Hope everyone is staying safe and preparing to get back to whatever our “new normal” is going to be in the wake of this pandemic. Lots of BC wineries are open now and lots more opening up in the near future, so if you are so inclined, get out there and support them. At a socially responsible distance of course!
Let’s get right to the reviews, starting with some Okanagan wine:
Some stuff from Australia and Chile:
And down the coast, we visit Oregon and California:
And, leaving the best for last, this is what all Zinfandel should taste like. This is the second consecutive vintage of this wine to achieve this high score. Hopefully once the borders open I will be able to get some more of this!
That’s it for today, and I am caught up on old reviews.
Next up: This Wednesday, I will be visiting a local winery for a tasting, and you can expect a full report on that later this week! Stay tuned!
Finally have time to catch up on reviews of some really good stuff we have been enjoying over the past several weeks/months. Starting with BC, let’s get right to it!
Here is an example of what a huge difference a vintage can make. This is a wine that usually shows beautifully year after year, but quite a difference in these two vintages for my palate!
And, a few beauties from other parts of the wine world. Try to find this one from Argentina if you can!
That’s it for now! Next up, lots more random stuff, as I am going to catch up on all my reviews in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will know that it’s a bit of a challenge to attend wine tastings these days. OK, it’s impossible.
So if you can’t go to a wine tasting, why not bring the tasting to you? That’s what Black Hills Estate Winery in Oliver is doing. You pick the wine (there are three packs available: Red, White, Mixed), and they ship it to you and spend an hour on Zoom with you, tasting through the wines. You’ll get led by a knowledgable wine evangelist, and you can bring as many friends as you like (they do not necessarily have to have purchased the pack – the winery requires only 2 packs purchased per session).
A couple weeks ago, we participate in the red wine session, and last night we participated in the white wine session. You can see the various offerings at this link.
We have been club members for years, but this would be the first time we had tasted these specific wines, with the exception of the Nota Bene and the Syrah, which we tasted at last year’s Nota Bene release party. I didn’t review them that evening, but I recall thinking how good the Syrah was, and how big and intense the Nota Bene was. My opinions have not changed.
The other red wine in the pack is the 2018 Carmenere. I am not reviewing that at this time, because I just didn’t like it very much. This is a wine that I usually absolutely love, but this one falls flat, for now. I have this wine in my cellar and I will report on it the next time we open one. I have no doubt it will improve with time; in fact, the bottle that we opened during this tasting did get better when we went back to it the next day, so there is lots of optimism. If you have these, I would definitely let them age for a while.
On to the report!
As for last night’s whites, we opened (and started enjoying) the Alibi about 5 hours before the tasting, and the Viognier about 3 hours before the tasting. Both improved significantly by the time we got the virtual tasting started. The Chardonnay was opened a half hour before the tasting but not poured until it was time to drink it during the event.
The winery is making plans to open with limited spaces available, in early June. You will need to make an appointment (or get very lucky if you just drop in), particularly early in the re-opening process, so if you are going to be in the area, give them a call and book your spot.
As a bonus review, when pulling the 2018 Viognier out of our wine fridge, I noticed that we had a couple bottles of the 2017 in there, so today we cracked that one open to see the difference…..and it’s a completely different wine.
That’s it for today! Coming up, a bunch of random stuff we have been enjoying over the past few weeks/months.
I am not the most patient person on the planet. In fact, I am probably closer to the other end of the spectrum. I want what I want, and I want it right freaking now. It has always been that way, and I can’t imagine it will change at this point in my life.
So, that kind of attitude really doesn’t work well in the world of fine wine. It needs to age, and since not many wineries do that for you (at least, not enough), you need to do it. That takes patience.
We have been buying wine for, I dunno, around a decade. I started up this blog in 2013, which was probably not long after we began our journey into wine, so it’s probably slightly less than a decade, in fact. But in that time, we have amassed quite a collection. The fruits of our labours, and the patience we have shown, are really starting to pay off.
(BTW did you know that studies estimate that 90% of all wine purchased in the USA is consumed WITHIN 24 HOURS??? That is awful. We have so much more work to do in educating the wine-drinking public).
Yesterday, I ventured out of the house to our offsite cellar. We had 6.5 cases of wine that needed to go in, through our various spring wine clubs and not to mention the wine we bought at the Vancouver International Wine Festival just before we ended up quarantined due to COVID-19. I don’t leave the house that often these days, but with some simple precautions, I am pretty unlikely to catch the virus dropping off and picking up wine at our cellar. It’s unlikely that I’ll run into any people there (and I didn’t), and the wine itself has been in the cellar since long before COVID-19 existed. And since I didn’t have room in our storage lockers to put 6.5 cases in, well, a bunch of “ready in 2020” wine had to come out.
Five cases, in fact, came home with me. This is where the patience is paying off. Many of these bottles have been in the cellar for many years, and looking at the vintages that are coming out….2010, 2011, 2012, 2013…..these wines will have aged beautifully. And I’m not just talking about those ‘special’ bottles either, a lot of the wines we brought home yesterday are just your everyday, easy drinking wines that might be fine to consume at their release date, but they’ll be much, much better now.
The only downside, of course, is that it’s not like I had room in our wine fridges for 5 cases of wine! Far from it. This is what the wine room looks like now.
Why all this talk about patience? Well, another instance of patience paid off last night, as we cracked open our first bottle of wine from Leonetti Cellar. We have tasted a few of their wines at tastings and had a couple bottles at restaurants in Vegas, but this is the first one we had opened at home. We spent 2-3 years on the waiting list just to be able to buy wine from them, and until last night, everything had gone into the cellar (and nothing had yet come out). This particular bottle came aged already, and although it would undoubtedly got even better with more time, you gotta drink this stuff sometimes, right?
Also yesterday, we enjoyed these two beautifully aged BC Chardonnays. The 2013 came home from the cellar with me yesterday, while the 2015 is actually the current vintage, as Checkmate does a bit of the aging for you!
Incidentally, my wife, who’s palette I totally respect, thought I transposed the scores on these two wines; she enjoyed the Checkmate just a tad more.
Oh, and speaking of drinking beautifully aged wine, from time to time you might get lucky and find a winery that is pulling some very old stuff from their cellar and putting it on sale. That was the case with this bottle that we bought recently. It was so good, we had to buy a couple more.
And to finish up this report, a bunch of random stuff we have enjoyed in the past weeks, including another off-the-charts-delicious Pinot Noir from Hartford.
Hope all my readers are safe and hunkered down with a tremendous amount of wine to get you through. We are going to be in this for a while.
Dine Italia is the best event of the VIWF, every year, and the event we look forward to most. It sells out in minutes every year, and one of these times we are not going to be lucky enough to get tickets, but that hasn’t happened yet. Knock on wood.
I would be remiss in not mentioning how incredibly lucky we all were, looking back. Spending a week in close quarters with wine producers and workers from all over the wine world, including France and Italy, which as we all know, have been absolutely devastated by this virus. At Dine Italia, I sat right next to Andrea Bermond Des Ambrois, the Export manager from Gancia wines. We talked, we shook hands, and we ate our meals shoulder to shoulder. Chilling.
To the food and wine we go!
Note – in cases where the price listed is followed by a ?, it means I am not sure where you could find this wine, but the price listed was given to us by the winery itself. It is likely a suggested retail price.
This is not totally my thing, I am not a huge fan of caviar OR smoked salmon, but it was still pretty darn tasty. It was paired with a wine we have had before, albeit I can’t remember exactly where.
For the first time in the history of this event, they served me something I couldn’t even try. I don’t like raw fish, I don’t like tuna cooked or not, I despise cucumber and I would rather eat dirt than watermelon. Not exactly a “Dean” dish. No biggie, it was bound to happen. Others enjoyed it.
It’s not unusual to have a pasta dish with mushrooms, but this is probably the first time I’ve had a mushroom dish with pasta. The mushrooms were the star here, and while mushrooms are not my favorite thing in the world, they can be delightful when done right. THIS was done right.
OH. MY. GOD. This was, probably, the best thing I have ever had here. It was unanimous amongst our group, this was just superb. The flavors melded perfectly, and it was paired beautifully with two excellent wines.
QUARTO
FILETTO ETRUSCA
Sous vide Alberta Angus reserve been tenderloin, fontina scallop potato, crispy sage, aged balsamic
Another really special dish, paired with two fabulous wines.
A perfect way to finish off a fantastic meal. Two wine pairings with this as well, one of which was a lot more successful than the other.
Well, that’s it for today and this officially closes off the 2020 Vancouver International Wine Festival for me. Here’s hoping that the friends we have made at this event year after year are all OK, and that our lives get back to normal before next year’s festival, which is being hosted by South America! Very much looking forward to it.
You’ve heard of “Love in the time of Cholera”? Welcome to “Wine in the time of Covid-19”. Man it feels weird to write a blog post about wine, or anything else, in these uncertain times, but let’s do it anyway.
My wife and I are virtually quarantined; she has autoimmune issues, so she hasn’t been out of the house in over a week, except to take the dog out to do her business. I have only been out twice, to pick up some groceries and run a couple of essential errands. She works from home all the time anyway, and I am lucky enough to have a job where I can do the same for the duration of this pandemic. We know that we are incredibly fortunate, so many people have no ability to work from home, so they either have to stay away from work and lose the income, or take their chances in the face of a pandemic. Neither choice seems very good to me.
Anyway, on to more pleasant topics, the rest of the world that we sampled at the recent Vancouver International Wine Festival. If you read my two entries on the host region of France, you will know that we really focused on France this year, getting to all but (I think) 4 tables. The downside to that, of course, is that we got to a lot fewer tables of all the other countries.
We bought everything we tasted here, except for the trade-only wine which wasn’t available…and we certainly would have bought that too if it had been!
Pascual Toso 2016 Magdalena Toso – 93+
Australia
Table 49 – Angove Family Winemakers
Angove Family Winemakers 2018 GSM – 92
Angove Family Winemakers 2018 Family Crest Chardonnay – 88
Angove Family Winemakers 2018 Organic Cabernet Sauvignon – 85
Angove Family Winemakers 2017 Warboys Single Vineyard McLaren Vale Grenache – 90
Table 51 – Jacob’s Creek
Jacob’s Creek 2016 St. Hugo Cabernet Sauvignon – 91
Jacob’s Creek 2018 Steingarten Riesling – 87
Jacob’s Creek 2019 Tea & Wine Chardonnay – 82
Jacob’s Creek 2018 Double Barrel Chardonnay – 88
Jacob’s Creek 2017 Double Barrel Shiraz – 89
Table 52 – Majella Wines
We had the distinct pleasure of speaking at length with owner Brian Lynn, a delightful gentleman who enchanted us with tales about various winery topics; in particular, the story of how this particular wine came about:
Viña Carmen 2019 DO Matorral Chileno – 85
Viña Carmen 2017 Gran Reserva Cabernet Sauvignon – 89
Table 90 – Viña Santa Ema
Viña Santa Ema 2017 Amplus Cabernet Sauvignon – 89
Viña Santa Ema 2017 Gran Reserva Merlot – 88
Viña Santa Ema 2019 Gran Reserva Sauvignon Blanc – 87
Felsengartenkellerei  2017 Acolon Terra S – 86
Felsengartenkellerei  2018 Justines Kerner Fels Edition – 88
Felsengartenkellerei  2018 Riesling Terra S – 86
Table 99 – Weingut Nik Weis – St. Urbans-HOF
St. Urbans-HOF 2018 Urban Riesling – 89
St. Urbans-HOF 2018 Bockstein Kabinett Riesling – 92
Italy
Table 101 – Basilisco
Basilisco 2015 Teodosio Aglianico del Vulture – 91
Table 106 – Gancia
Gancia NV Prosecco DOC Brut – 89
Table 107 – Cantine Giacomo Montresor
Cantine Giacomo Montresor 2018 Soave le Fattorie – 90
Table 108 – Casale del Giglio
Casale del Giglio 2018 Bellone Bianco Lazio IGT – 88
Casale del Giglio 2017 Cesanese Rosso Lazio IGT – 89
Casale del Giglio 2013 Mater Matuta Rossa Lazio IGT – 91
Foncesa NV Bin 27 Reserve Port – 88
Fonseca NV Terra Prima Organic Port – 88
Fonseca 10 Year Old Tawny Port – 92
Fonseca 2017 Vintage Port – 93
Table 131 – Quinta Da Foz
Quinta Da Foz 2014 Douro Tinto – 90
Quinta Da Foz 2018 Vinha da Foz Douro Branco – 88
Quinta Da Foz 2015 Douro Tinto – 87
Quinta Da Foz 2015 Grande Reserva Vinhas Velhas Tinto – 93
Table 132 – Lavradores de Feitoria
Labradores de Feitoria 2016 TrĂŞs Bagos Douro Reserva Red – 91
Labradores de Feitoria 2016 8 Bagos White – 86
Labrodores de Feitoria 2016 8 Bagos Red – 87
Michael David Winery 2017 Petite Petit – 91
Michael David Winery 2015 Freakshow Cabernet Sauvignon – 88
Michael David Winery 2017 Earthquake Petite Sirah – 92
Michael David Winery 2016 Lust Zinfandel – 90
Well folks, that is it for the tasting room at the 2020 VIWF. One last report from that event, the best event of the festival every single year, Dine Italia!
Confessions of a Huge Wine-R 