This is What We Live For!!

Hockey Playoffs are under way and the good folks of Vancouver (and hopefully many others) are having dreams of our Canucks winning sixteen more games this season - since that's the magic number of wins the team will need to win the Stanley Cup.

As I've done for the last two years of playoffs, I'm going to match a BC winery with our boys and we'll try to coordinate a different bottle from the winery with each Canucks game. The further the Canucks go into the playoffs, the more wine we'll be able to enjoy.

Red Rooster, on the Naramata Bench in the Okanagan, is the winery I'm lining up for Round 1. Regular readers of the blog will be used to seeing Red Rooster on these pages. Boo and I have "adopted a row" at the winery as part of a unique community marketing scheme and, indeed, I was just up at the winery a couple of weeks back for their annual Spring Pruning Party. Not surprisingly, we sip back enjoy a great many of their wines. And this year, they get the task of helping us drink our way through these initial games.

Of course, we've got a bit of a hurdle to get over with the first series. As luck would have it, the Canucks have drawn the Chicago Blackhawks - the buggers that have unceremoniously tossed us from the playoffs for the last two years running. We Canucks are hanging our collective hat on the fact that this is a different year with different teams. The Canucks head into the playoffs stronger and Chicago is missing a couple of players that really disrupted our team last year.

And the boys are off to a fantastic start!! The 2-0 win is exactly what was needed to help the City set the mood for the games to come.

769. 2009 Red Rooster Pinot Noir (VQA Okanagan Valley)

Red Rooster has recently announced, proudly, that the 2009 Pinot won four top titles in the same competition - the 2011 Jerry Mead International Wine Competition. The competition is open to wines produced anywhere in the New World and entries come from North and South America, South Africa and Australia/New Zealand. It is also somewhat unique in that it not only judges wines by varietal and blend, but also by price range.

Tonight's Pinot won a Platinum medal, was named Best in Class for Pinots priced $12-$25, won Best of Varietal and was named Best New World Pinot Noir. Heady praise! I was hoping that opening the playoffs with a big winner might encourage the boys a bit. It sure didn't seem to hurt.

Pinot Noir isn't generally the first Red Rooster wine I reach for, but I'm certainly glad we had this one on hand. Neither big with overwhelming fruit, nor completely restrained and full of earthy notes, both Boo and I thought winemaker, Karen Gillis, and team hit a lovely balance of deep cherry and medium structure that was completely approachable with both dinner and just watching the game. I don't see laying it down for years to see if it improves but I can see why it's hitting all the right notes at this moment.

With only 421 cases having been made. I don't know if there's enough around to send a case to the Canucks to celebrate their first win, but I'm glad we still have a couple of bottles on hand.

Here's hoping that the outcome on the rest of the games - and the wines to accompany them - are just as successful.