Category: riesling

New BC wineries appear quite regularly.  Some I hear about before hand, while others take me by surprise.  Monte Creek Ranch is one of the wineries that falls in the latter category, plus they are in the Kamloops area, which has recently had a few wineries set up their homes; Harper’s Trail, Sagewood, and Privato. Who is Monte Creek Ranch…

It has been a long voyage of discovery for me to find out what type of relationship Riesling grapes have with the soils of BC, or as some may say the terroir of the area.  As mentioned in previous articles, it started with the idea, then contacting all BC wineries that produce a Riesling wine, to ask for a sample…

BC is a cool climate region, but we all know as we travel from South Okanagan northward, the climate does cool down, and that there are preferences for growing warmer climate grapes further south, and more aromatic whites further north.  From the BC Riesling Review, we see that Riesling is grown in the Okanagan Valley from the border up past…

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step”.  Lao Tzu This spring, I took my first step, with the thought that maybe the different soil types in BC affect the aromas and flavours of our grapes.  How to test that thought?  There are so many different varieties of grapes.  I settled upon testing this theory with Riesling.  It…

What is Soil? Isn’t that a strange question?  We walk on it, build things on it, grow vegetables in it, but what is soil? Soil is a very important part of the BC Riesling Review as this is where the nutrients for the Riesling grapes come from.  I will try to keep this article interesting without being too dry and…

The hard part of the BC Riesling Review is done.  I tasted through 35 wines over a period of 3 months.  I can say that it has been a very interesting experience.  Below are the notes.  I tasted each wine two times.  The first time was as soon as I poured the wine in my glass.  The second time was…

With summer holidays and then the extended power outage due to the wind storm this past weekend, I have finally finished tasting through all the 2013-14 vintages of BC Riesling that I received from BC wineries.  Thank you all.  My next step is to enter all my tasting notes into a database.  The database will be broken down by primary…

There are many methods or devices that people use to add oxygen to wine to soften it up and bring out the flavours and aromas of the wines.  It can be as simple as a decanter.  One of the devices which I heard about, called OptiWine, caught my interest.  I emailed the company optiwine.fr and asked them for one of…

Summer is nearly upon us, but the weather feels like it is already here.  Time to spend time on the patio with family and friends. And of course some nice chilled bottles of BC white wine.  Last week I attended the latest BLOOM BC VQA Spring Release Tasting, and tasted the newest BC white wines, and I have a few…

I am a lover of Riesling.  It allows the wine maker to produce wine in many styles, from bone dry, to a lusciously sweet ice wine.  While we here in BC have talked about making very good aromatic white wines, I have not yet seen a systematic analysis of our aromatic grapes, Riesling in particular, and how the wines differ…