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Wine Recommendation
Mission Hill Winery
2006 Reserve Riesling Icewine(Okanagan Valley)
Mission Hill has Riesling in vineyards throughout the Okanagan, including a plot just below the winery on the slope of Mount Boucherie. This gives the winemaking team options on where to source the best fruit and on blending several lots for more complexity. The winery also produces icewines for several of its tiers of wine, doing it so well that a value-priced Vidal icewine for its popular Prospect Wine Company brand won gold at the recent British Columbia icewine festival.
While Vidal is the most common grape for Canadian icewine, Riesling is generally considered the class of the field, both in Canada and in Germany. Riesling’s occasionally piercing acidity is the necessary counterpart to all the sugar, lending elegance and balance to the wine.
This wine, gold in hue, has rich aromas of apricots, honey and raisins. This carries through to flavours of tangerine, apricot and honey, the latter reflecting the 298 grams of natural sugar per litre. The label does not disclose the remaining acidity but there is enough to give the wine a long, tangy finish. 90 points.
Reviewed March 12, 2008 by John Schreiner.
Other reviewed wines from Mission Hill Winery
 2006 Reserve Riesling Fritz Hasselbach Collection (Okanagan Valley)John Schreiner 10/4/2007 |
 2006 Reserve Pinot Blanc, Lakeshore Vineyard (Okanagan Valley)John Schreiner 10/4/2007 |
The Wine
Winery: Mission Hill 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. |