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Wine Recommendation
Glenterra Vineyard
2006 Pinot Blanc, Estate(Vancouver Island)
Glenterra Vineyards is one of Vancouver Island’s smallest wineries (production of about 550 cases). Winemaker and co-owner John Kelly has turned this into a virtue, handcrafting small lots of exceptional wines, primarily from fruit grown in his 5 ½ acre vineyard. That includes a test plot of about 40 obscure varieties (Helfensteiner, Korento, Cantaro among them) which the previous owner had been trialing. Cleverly, Kelly blends all of his odd reds into a wine called Brio and all of the odd whites into a wine called Vivace, and sells out both every year.
Pinot Blanc is another example of how Kelly succeeds in elevating a variety about which, usually, there is limited consumer appeal. At Glenterra, the variety takes the place, quite successfully, of Chardonnay. Kelly ferments and ages this estate-grown Pinot Blanc in oak. The wine shows some oak notes in the spicy aroma. On the palate, it presents luscious tropical fruit flavours, with refreshing acidity to give crispness to the finish. 89 points.
Reviewed October 4, 2007 by John Schreiner.
Other reviewed wines from Glenterra Vineyard
The Wine
Winery: Glenterra Vineyard |
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. |