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Wine Recommendation
Inniskillin Okanagan Vineyards Winery
2005 Discovery Series Malbec, McIntyre Vineyard(Okanagan Valley)
At Inniskillin Okanagan, Hungarian-trained winemaker Sandor Mayer has a mandate unique among Vincor’s winemakers in British Columbia. Perhaps to the envy of his peers, he gets to make all of the small lot wines from grape varieties that are new, or relatively so, to the Okanagan. These so-called Discovery Series wines are meant to be a proving ground for the valley’s varieties of the future. Certainly, Malbec is one of those varieties.
Mayer also likes to make big wines, big in flavour and in alcohol. The grapes for this wine got pretty much the maximum hang time for the Okanagan, being picked November 1, ripe enough to produce 14 percent alcohol. After fermentation, Mayer let the wine macerate on the skins for 21 days, then put it through full malolactic fermentation before aging it 12 months in French and American oak. The winery released 550 cases.
This wine begins richly with aromas of vanilla, plum and chocolate. These carry through on the palate, where the delicious and complex flavours recall Christmas pudding (if the pudding were not sweet). The long ripe tannins give the wine a rich, satisfying texture. 90 points.
Reviewed February 22, 2008 by John Schreiner.
Other reviewed wines from Inniskillin Okanagan Vineyards Winery
 2005 Zinfandel , Bear Cub Vineyard (Okanagan Valley)John Schreiner 2/27/2008 |
The Wine
Winery: Inniskillin Okanagan Vineyards 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. |