2011 was a unique vintage, one that left a lasting impression on us as a winery. It was a cold, wet spring and early summer, and it wasn’t until August 1st that we started to see the tides change. It gave away to a warm, dry summer and allowed for fantastic ripening and flavour development. Unfortunately, if you weren’t totally prepared and hadn’t managed the vineyard appropriately, you would have been disappointed come October.
Fortunately, we set ourselves up very well and came out at the end of harvest with really great quality fruit. However, the vintage forced our hand in the cellar to create elegant, restrained, subtle wines – the weather didn’t give us the huge, soft wines we see in hotter vintages. Many of these wines have gone on to achieve huge success. The 2011 Quintessential was just named BC’s Best Iconic Red at the 7th Annual BC Icons Tasting, and Best Canadian Red, Gold and 95-100 points at the International Wine Challenge. The 2011 Coyote Bowl Syrah took 95-100 points at Decanter World Wine Awards and Best in Class at Pacific Rim International Wine Competition.
So what can we take away from this difficult vintage in the vineyard, but tremendously successful vintage in the bottle?
Sometimes less is more. There’s a lot to be said about restraint, subtlety and elegance. It’s a philosophy we are being mindful of going into the much warmer vintages of ’12, ’13 and ’14 – vintages where it’d be easy to create huge, monstrous wines that hit you over the head with big ripe fruit and tremendous tannin. As our winemaker Jeff Del Nin says, we’re going to make “iron fists in velvet gloves.”