California vintners seeking solutions for sustainability
In California, Sonoma County wine growers will open a centre for agricultural sustainability to function as a think-tank, using outside business professionals to help define plans to make the United States’ grape crop 100 per cent sustainable by 2019. Participants will meet every four months to discuss issues that challenge the industry’s future and find solutions to deal with them. Up first: a major shortage of field workers and competition for labour from cannabis.
If you are curious about the future of wine, I asked 10 interesting people attending the 2017 Vancouver International Wine Festival to bring a great bottle of wine with a strong sense of place to a tasting. The star-studded evening features wines from New and Old World producers perhaps best described as coming from the Next World. Tickets at vanwinefest.ca.
B.C. WINE OF THE WEEK
Quails’ Gate Chardonnay Stewart Family Reserve 2015, Okanagan Valley $35 | 90/100
UPC: 778856215014 Winemaker Nikki Callaway continues to play with her Chardonnay, tweaking the Stewart Family Reserve to highlight its ample styling and leaving it closer to the popular New World California style. Another warm year means you feel the warmth underneath the ripe baked apple, sweet melon flavours, flecked with buttery fruit, butterscotch and spice. The opulence, intensified by the vintage, gives fans of the rich Chardonnay style (albeit a modern-styled one) a wine they will love. Rich sweet seafood like lobster, crab or creamy seafood pasta dishes come to mind as a perfect match.
WINE FOR THE CELLAR
Nk’Mip Cellars Qwam Qwmt Cabernet Sauvignon 2014, Okanagan Valley $31 | 91/100 UPC: 0836909004142 If you are looking for a local Cabernet Sauvignon that is ripe and balanced, this is it. It’s a big red but everything is in perfect balance. Juicy black fruit, bright acidity and sweet, soft, long chain tannins. It is a savoury affair with plenty of dried desert herbs, dark fruit, bits of cocoa and an enticing long finish of fruit and just enough oak. Give this a decade, or drink it now with a big piece of roasted meat.