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Wine Recommendation
Le Vieux Pin
2005 Époque, Kalalla Vineyard(Okanagan Valley)
Le Vieux Pin is a 3,500-case super-premium winery launched by Sean Salem, a Vancouver developer, Gregory Thomas, a Vancouver investment executive, and Anthony Burée, a Vancouver wine consultant and now the winery’s manager. The trio are setting to make intensely flavoured wines reflecting the terroir of their various south Okanagan vineyards. Le Vieux Pin – named for a single old pine tree at the Oliver winery – also will anchor a proposed resort.
During his previous career with the B.C. Liquor Distribution Branch, Burée became disenchanted with some of the timid Merlot wines emerging from the Okanagan. The wines seldom showed the power and richness of the wines being produced in the Walla Walla Valley of Washington, a two-hour drive from the Okanagan but with comparable soil and climate conditions. The Walla Walla Valley Merlots have become Le Vieux Pin’s benchmark.
The grapes for Époque are from an organic Golden Mile vineyard, with a crop load of only 2 ¾ tons an acre. The result is a wine more muscular than most Okanagan Merlots. It is dark, almost black, in colour, with gobs of black cherries, plums and chocolate boldly framed by primarily French oak. The texture is firm and concentrated, with ripe tannins. The wine should develop well with another five years of cellaring. Only 100 cases have been made. 89 points.
Reviewed February 12, 2007 by John Schreiner.
Other reviewed wines from Le Vieux Pin
The Wine
Winery: Le Vieux Pin |
The Reviewer
John Schreiner
John Schreiner has been covering the wines of British Columbia for the past 30 years and has written 10 books on the wines of Canada and BC. He has judged at major competitions and is currently a panel member for the Lieutenant Governor’s Awards of Excellence in Wine. Both as a judge and as a wine critic, he approaches each wine not to find fault, but to find excellence. That he now finds the latter more often than the former testifies to the dramatic improvement shown by BC winemaking in the past decade. |