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Wine Recommendation
Sumac Ridge Estate Winery
2006 Gewurztraminer Icewine(Okanagan Valley)
Sumac Ridge, which has been making Gewürztraminer table wines since 1981, is British Columbia’s single largest producer of this variety. With access to multiple blocks of this variety, including North America’s largest single planting at Hawthorne Mountain Vineyards in the central Okanagan, the winery often sets aside some tonnage for icewine. Typical volumes are around 800 cases of wine in 200 ml bottles. Each bottle is just the right size for a dinner party of four.
Gewürztraminer is a challenging icewine variety because the grapes lose acidity as they ripen. There is no indication whether or not the winemaker added acid for balancing, but it is permitted and he likely did.
This wine begins with the spicy aromas of the variety - Muscat, lychee, rosewater. On the palate, the wine shows an array of tropical flavours with a touch of lime and a note of honey. With only moderate acidity, the wine finishes perceptibly sweet and rich. However, the hint of bitterness that many Muscat varieties have on the finish is very beneficial here in leaving the palate clean. 88 points.
Reviewed March 12, 2008 by John Schreiner.
Other reviewed wines from Sumac Ridge Estate Winery
 2006 Chardonnay, Black Sage Vineyard (Okanagan Valley)John Schreiner 3/19/2008 |
The Wine
Winery: Sumac Ridge 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. |