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Wine Recommendation
Quails' Gate Estate Winery
2005 Limited Release Chardonnay(Okanagan Valley)
With a production of 4,251 cases, this is a well-priced bread and butter Chardonnay from a very fine vintage. Quails’ Gate considers that Chardonnay is the “queen” of its line (naturally, Pinot Noir is king). The Limited Release style aims at showcasing the fruit, not the winemaker tricks that Chardonnay lends itself to.
Half of this wine was fermented in stainless steel, the other half was barrel-fermented. The resulting blend shows the best of both worlds – good fruit with subtle oak complexity. Like any good Chardonnay, this wine should not be over chilled. But if it starts too cold, be patient and enjoy it as the warming wine unrolls layer upon layer of aroma and taste – citrus on the nose, with flavours of apples and tropical fruits. The barrel-fermented portion adds an interesting buttery richness on the palate.
Reviewed July 10, 2007 by John Schreiner.
Other reviewed wines from Quails' Gate Estate Winery
 2006 Stewart Family Reserve Chardonnay (Okanagan Valley)John Schreiner 3/19/2008 |
 2005 Family Reserve Pinot Noir, Estate (Okanagan Valley)John Schreiner 5/23/2007 |
The Wine
Winery: Quails' Gate 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. |