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Wine Recommendation
Seven Stones Winery
2005 Cabernet-Merlot, Harmony One(Similkameen Valley)
Few novice grape growers in British Columbia have learned viticulture as quickly as Seven Stones proprietor George Hanson. Prior to 2000, this Alberta native had spent 25 years with a telephone company in the Yukon. He had nurtured the dream of becoming a winegrower and when his employer gave him an early golden handshake, he invested the severance package in a 15-acre vineyard property he planted in the Similkameen Valley in 2000. As soon as the vines – mostly Bordeaux reds – began producing, he found eager buyers among the leading Okanagan wineries.
Beginning in 2005, George and his wife, Vivianne, began keeping some of their grapes for their Seven Stones winery, which opened in the spring of 2007. The wines have won general acclaim, further testimony to Hanson’s acumen as a grower.
This blended red wine is an excellent example. It begins with aromas of almost perfumed fruit layered over vanilla and chocolate. These elements carry through to flavours of spiced currants, plums and more chocolate. The ripe tannins give the wine a satisfying chewy texture but also the backbone to allow graceful aging for at least five more years. 89 points.
Reviewed October 20, 2007 by John Schreiner.
Other reviewed wines from Seven Stones Winery
The Wine
Winery: Seven Stones Winery |
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. |