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Wine Recommendation
Hillside Estate Winery
2005 Mosaic(Okanagan Valley)
In the early 1990s, when it was just a small farmgate winery with a postage stamp vineyard, Hillside began producing what is believed to have been the Okanagan’s first varietal Cabernet Sauvignon. Beginning in 2002, the full array of Bordeaux varieties has become available and a blend called Mosaic has become the winery’s flagship red.
The wine is superbly crafted by Kelly Symonds, a Canadian-born winemaker with an enology degree from the University of Adelaide. To make this wine, she chose lots of fruit from 10 vineyards from the Naramata Bench to Osoyoos. The wine was aged in French oak.
This wine, from one of the Okanagan’s finest vintages, begins with a fine red berry and spice aroma. With a good core of sweet fruit, the wine has a satisfying entry, with great length and a lingering finish. The tannins are ripe and long, giving the wine an elegant texture. The winemaker’s style is to strike a balance, making the wine soft enough to be enjoyed on release but with backbone for aging. She suggests this vintage of Mosaic will cellar well for the next five years. 89 points.
Reviewed October 20, 2007 by John Schreiner.
Other reviewed wines from Hillside Estate Winery
The Wine
Winery: Hillside Estate 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. |