|
|
Wine Recommendation
Tinhorn Creek Vineyards
2006 Oldfield’s Collection 2Bench(Okanagan Valley)
This is the second vintage of a wine that has accelerated the trend to blended whites in British Columbia as producers scramble to differentiate themselves amid an ocean of varietals. To be sure, Tinhorn Creek’s six varietal wines remain the winery’s bread and butter. Oldfield’s Collection is how the winery identifies its reserve range. Significantly, its only reserve white is this complex blend.
Winemaker Sandra Oldfield ferments each of four varieties separately, putting the barrel-fermented Chardonnay (but none of the others) through malolactic fermentation. Four months after harvest, the blend is assembled in a stainless steel tank and allowed to settle into harmony before being bottled under screw cap closures.
The wine begins with notes of herbs, citrus and minerals in the aroma. The wine presents layers of flavour, including pears and lime. The minerals and the acidity give this wine a crisp and slightly austere finish but those are qualities giving the wine aging potential. Tinhorn Creek is monitoring how its wines develop under screw cap, promising to report the tasting results on its web site. The winery made 552 cases. 87 points.
Reviewed January 17, 2008 by John Schreiner.
Other reviewed wines from Tinhorn Creek Vineyards
The Wine
Winery: Tinhorn Creek 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. |