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Wine Recommendation
Poplar Grove Winery
2004 Legacy(Okanagan Valley)
In previous vintages, this wine was known as Poplar Grove Reserve. Vancouver marketing consultant Bernie Hadley-Beauregard recrafted the winery’s label to create a more up-market name matching the price. Winemaker Ian Sutherland has made a wine that’s worth every penny.
Since opening in 1997, Poplar Grove has achieved a cult following for what used to be a frustratingly small production, especially of Cabernet Franc, Merlot and the Bordeaux blend. That is about to change. Sutherland recently sold a 75% interest in the winery to Tony Holler, a former pharmaceutical tycoon who grew up in the Okanagan. Holler and Sutherland plan a much larger winery in a few years, with rising production. The 2005 vintage of The Legacy, already bottled, will be 1,100 cases.
This wine, which Sutherland compares to a Saint-Émilion in style, spends 18 months in French oak and another 18 months in bottle before release. The wine is muscular and concentrated, with aromas of red berries and cedar and with flavours of spicy plums. The structure is firm for superb long-term aging while the time in bottle before release has allowed the wine to take on a polished elegance. 92 points.
Reviewed October 20, 2007 by John Schreiner.
Other reviewed wines from Poplar Grove Winery
The Wine
Winery: Poplar Grove 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. |