Your intrepid liquor reporter made his annual pilgrimage to the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia last month, on a tasting tour of the area wineries during the Fall Harvest Wine Festival.
With nearly 9000 acres under vine, the 175 wineries of the Okanagan Valley feel like a second home to your globetrotting liquor columnist.
Your humble narrator usually tries to seek out the small vineyards that do not sell into Alberta, but it had been several years since I visited one of the Okanagan’s largest wineries, so I decided to pop into the Mission Hill Family Estate Winery for lunch and a tour.
Followers of the British royal family may recall that Will & Kate visited Mission Hill back in September, where they were put to work plucking grapes from the vine, before being whisked away for a tour and what I am sure was a sampling from the private library reserve that is not available to the commoners.
For those readers not familiar with the Mission Hill Family Estate Winery, it is one of the oldest and largest wineries of the Okanagan.
Established in 1981 just outside of West Kelowna, Mission Hill boasts stunning old-world architecture, an outdoor amphitheatre with seating for 1200, and cavernous underground cellars for aging wine in enormous oaken casks.
While most of Mission Hill’s wines are available here in Alberta, a few of their top-tier Bordeaux-styled blends have such small yields that they quickly sell out the entire vintage directly from the winery door.
Mission Hill divides their wines into six different tiers, with the price points starting around $13 for the mass market wines, going up to over $100 for the premier bottlings with the smallest yields.
The entry levels wines are rock solid table wines, which boast consistent quality and great value for an average price of $15.
My favourites were found in the mid-priced tier, with most bottles hovering around the $25 mark. The Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon was full-bodied, with lots of plum and cassis notes on the tongue, followed by a smoky leather finish from the extended oak aging.
A funny bit of trivia is that the family behind the Mission Hill Winery also invented Mike’s Hard Lemonade way back in 1996, and the vodka-based alcopop was even briefly produced at the Mission Hill Winery.
Production of Mike’s Hard Lemonade was soon moved from Canada to the USA, where the formulation was changed from a vodka-based drink to the much less classy malt liquor, largely due to more attractive tax rates in the USA.
With the alcopop days long behind them, Mission Hill has consistently been held out as a paragon of the Canadian Wine industry, and was awarded their sixth trophy for Canadian Winery of the Year in 2015.
The majority of the wines produced at Mission Hill are old-world French varietals, grown in the 32 different vineyards that Mission Hill owns throughout the Okanagan Valley.
Single-bottle varietals of the popular grapes like Chardonnay, Riesling, Merlot, and Cab Sauv are the big sellers, but Mission Hill also grows a few less common grapes, such as Vidal, which is frequently used for making ice wine.
Ice wine is a fickle mistress, and is a pricey gamble for a winemaker to take each year. A portion of the grape harvest must be left on the vine after harvest, with the hope that Mother Nature will bring a hard frost to freeze the grapes on the vine before they have a chance to rot.
The frozen grapes must then be quickly picked by hand, with each grape gently squeezed to produce a single drop of highly concentrated sweet liquid from the very center of the grape.
Mission Hill last ice wine was produced in 2013, and we do not yet know if there will be an ice wine this year. If a hard frost occurs in the next few weeks, the winery staff will drop everything to hand-pick the frozen grapes and lovingly coax the sweet nectar from each grape to make ice wine.
With annual production of over 350 000 cases, Mission Hill is widely available across Canada, making it easy to find at your local booze merchant. Take home a bottle and try it for yourself!
