Mission Hill Winery
2004 S.L.C. Sauvignon Blanc-Sémillon(Okanagan Valley)
Mission Hill’s super-premium wines are designated as Special Lot Collection, or S.L.C. For this limited production collection, winemaker John Simes selects his best estate-grown fruit and takes particular pains with the winemaking. To make this wine, he fermented 83% of the juice in French oak and then left the wine four months on its lees.
The result is considerable complexity. In the glass, it shows attractive greenish-gold glints and presents a fresh aroma of citrus. The flavours include lime and tangerine that gave the wine a core of sweet fruit burnished with light vanilla and butterscotch notes from the barrel fermented portion. The dry finish is long, with hints of ripe pineapple and with a minerality that recalls quality Graves. 88 points.
Reviewed June 17, 2006 by John Schreiner.
Other reviewed wines from Mission Hill Winery
Mission Hill Winery 2006 Reserve Riesling Fritz Hasselbach Collection (Okanagan Valley)John Schreiner 10/4/2007 |
Mission Hill Winery 2006 Reserve Pinot Blanc, Lakeshore Vineyard (Okanagan Valley)John Schreiner 10/4/2007 |
The Wine
Winery: Mission Hill Winery |
The ReviewerJohn 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. |