There is nothing bad to say about this wine. As a wine. It’s a generous blend, fruit forward, lovely notes of tobacco and plum, easy to drink, food friendly. Has the velvet of Merlot and a bit of the funk of Cab Franc. If it sold at $22 or less I’d buy a couple of cases. No doubt it’s sold out at the vineyard due to it’s remarkable approachability.
Here’s the rub: This is a wine that France and Argentina and Australia can produce and retail at $10 less. Gismondi recently gave 91 points to a Cotes du Roussillon blend (Syrah and Grenache); different varietals I know, but wowza, it just flattened the KL. And the CdR has years ahead of it. That is just the tip of the iceberg. Half decent and pretty good and not too bad BC wines are regularly overpriced.
This wine, which btw we really enjoyed, I want to stress that part, but this wine is indicative of the reason we started posting seven years ago. I mean you have to either pay through the nose for Hypothesis, or suck it up for generic blends, and the decent, everyday wines, like the KL, well they are wonderful to drink but sting at the cash register.
There is room here for a whole editorial on the nascent BC wine industry, tax, labour, distribution, regs, the lot, and we don’t need to belabour it. This is a simple consumer blog. We have after tax dollars, not too many, and we like wine. And, importantly, we’d love to support the BC wine industry more fully. But it’s a snub to average wine drinkers that great BC wines are $20 more than foreign equivalents and good wines about $10 more.
Price: $29.99 before taxes at Save-On Foods in White Rock.
Market Liquidity: Crazy name but krazy good.
