The winter has flown by and we’ve been busy both at the vineyard with the harvest and winemaking and around town with tastings and dinners. Congratulations are in order to Felix, our resident vineyard manager, who picked up a number of scholarships for his wine making and viticulture studies. We’re also proud to have become involved in the British Columbia Sustainable Winegrowing Program, an initiative to help growers and winemakers reduce water and energy use, minimize chemical use, build healthy soils, protect air and water quality, and reduce waste water and solid waste production. To help us keep in touch, we’ve joined Twitter! Follow us at www.twitter.com/closdusoleil
We launched our Growers Series on the Spring Equinox. Our first offering of the series, a 2010 Pinot Blanc from the Baessler family vineyard was released on March 21st garnering a very enthusiastic response – the Vancouver allocation sold out in just 9 days! Not to worry, we’ve kept about 50 cases or so back at the winery for visitors to try this summer. Yes – our tasting room will be open starting April 29th this year. We won’t be staffed every day – mostly the weekends – so to avoid disappointment I would suggest calling Felix a couple of days ahead of time to confirm a time at 250 499-2831 or 250 499-9340.
Pruning is just about finished at the vineyard and soon we’ll be making preparations for a bit of replanting before setting up the bottling line in May. It will be a busy few days as we bottle our 2009 Eclipse, Signature and Celéstiale along with our 2010 Fumé Blanc and Saturn.
Wait a minute you say? What are all these new wines? I’ll tell you:
Our Eclipse has nothing to do with vampires and everything to do with fantastic grapes. Only produced in years with excellent growing conditions, small lots of hand harvested grapes were fermented and aged in specially selected, new French oak barriques under the watchful eye of winemaker Ann Sperling. Following skilful blending the wine will be bottled then set aside for extended aging – it won’t be released until 2012. This limited offering represents our highest expression of artisan winemaking. It is beautiful and elegant now, but, will continue to age gracefully over the next 10-15 years.
Celéstiale, which will début this summer, is a wine meant for everyday enjoyment that reflects the artisan skill, experience and passion behind our Signature and Eclipse reds. Hand harvested grapes, fermented in small lots, were blended then aged for 18 months in French Oak barriques, resulting in a beautiful wine at exceptional value. Enjoy with hearty traditional dishes, grilled red meats, hard cheeses and earthy vegetables.
Our Fumé Blanc, also for release this summer, is another wine meant for everyday enjoyment. It is a further exploration of the wonderful Sauvignon Blanc behind our signature white wine, Capella. Hand harvested grapes were fermented in new French Oak puncheons to produce a crisp, well-balanced wine with notes of grapefruit and passionfruit along with a gentle hint of oak. Enjoy with traditional West Coast seafood dishes or grilled South Western chicken and meats. This wine also pairs well with soft cheeses.
Saturn? Well, we felt that you should be able to accompany an entire meal with our wines, so we’re introducing a dessert wine styled after the Sauternes of France. You’ll find our Select Late Harvest wine is a riff on the traditional sweet wine from the Bordeaux, but with a little Canadian edge – the hallmark of Clos du Soleil’s wine tradition. Clean and satisfying, Saturn is a fine accompaniment for foie gras terrine or creamy blue cheeses as well as desserts. Delicious now, it will mature for decades.
For those of you who believe you can never get enough of a good thing, we’ll be bottling a limited number of large format bottles of the ’09 Signature. The 1.5L will run $89.90, while the 3L and 6L will run $199.90 and $399.90 respectively and be packaged in hand crafted wooden boxes. If you’re interested, call us at the winery (250) 499-2831, or email us at wine@closdusoleil.ca. Don’t delay, we bottle in May!
Finally, while you won’t be able to enjoy all of our new wines just yet, we do have a number of upcoming releases that you might be interested in:
21 June – 2009 Capella; 2009 Celéstiale & 2010 Fumé Blanc
21 September – 2009 Signature & 2010 Saturn
That’s it for now. Until next time, A votre Sante!
Spencer
