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Wine Recommendation
Laughing Stock Vineyards
2005 Portfolio(Okanagan Valley)
This wine is scheduled for release in September but, as has been the winery’s practise, it has been taking advance orders this spring at a modest discount for a portion of the 1,890 cases (and 50 magnums) that have been produced.
It is not as if selling Portfolio is difficult. The wine established a cult following soon after the first vintage, from 2003, was released. A good part of that cult includes stock market professionals, associates of Laughing Stock owners David and Cynthia Enns during their former career as financial consultants. Each vintage of Portfolio mines that theme, with ticker tape labels featuring selected share prices on the harvest dates of the grapes in each bottle. Portfolio consumers who can decipher the label must feel like insiders.
This third vintage of Portfolio is the best so far. That reflects the superb 2005 harvest. As well, the wine was the first to be made in Laughing Stock’s new gravity-flow winery and it is the first to include all five Bordeaux reds in the blend. This is a wine that begins with a powerful aroma of red fruits, spice and vanilla. The palate is rich with flavours of black currants, blackberries, chocolate, cedar and spice. This is a wine built for aging, with long ripe tannins. Yet the proteins of a good steak softened the tannins to reveal a lush, full-bodied wine. 90 points.
Reviewed May 26, 2007 by John Schreiner.
Other reviewed wines from Laughing Stock Vineyards
The Wine
Winery: Laughing Stock Vineyards |
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. |