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Wine Recommendation
Hawthorne Mountain
2003 Ping Meritage, See Ya Later Ranch(Okanagan Valley)
Quite likely, this is the best value red Meritage wine from British Columbia. It begins with aromas of plums. The flavours are layered, showing black cherry, currants, vanilla and chocolate, with ripe tannins that give it a generous texture.
The winery suggests this wine can age up to 70 dog years (or 10 human years). There's an inside joke here. A former owner of the property owned a long succession of dogs, one of whom was called Ping. At least 12 are buried under headstones now displayed in front of the tasting room. Weird? Perhaps -- but not the wines. Score: 90 points
Reviewed January 31, 2006 by John Schreiner.
The Wine
Winery: Hawthorne Mountain |
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. |