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Wine Recommendation
CedarCreek Estate Winery
2004 Merlot Platinum Reserve(Okanagan Valley)
CedarCreek’s top tier wines, designated Platinum Reserve, are deliberately limited in volume. The winery preserves the credibility (and the pricing) of its best wines by never making a lot. Typically, the production of P. R. Merlot has been about 500 cases a year.
This vintage is just being released, replacing the sold-out 2003s. In style, it is a big, bold wine, dark in colour, with aromas of spice and blackberries and plums. The fruit is rich, verging on jammy – spicy plums, currants, blueberries. The tannins are long and ripe, giving the wine an almost chewy texture.
Winemaker Tom Di Bello treats this fruit with much the same gentle extraction used for his Pinot Noir. While it is being fermented in stainless steel, the cap is turned gently twice daily by pneumattage (bubbles of air). The wine is then aged 18 months or more in French oak. The final blend includes some Cabernet Sauvignon and some Cabernet Franc, adding a complexity to the immediacy of Merlot’s appeal. 91 points.
Reviewed November 5, 2006 by John Schreiner.
Other reviewed wines from CedarCreek Estate Winery
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The Wine
Winery: CedarCreek 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. |