A New Picnic Table to Celebrate

My dear old Dad deliver a new picnic table because the old one was in pretty rough shape and we were worried that the benches might just collapse under us. It only made sense that we should break in the new table as quickly as possible; so we invited Mr. D. over to help do so with a little al fresco dinner. With September just around the corner, there may not be a great many more evenings worthy of garden dining.

1402.  2012 Mont Gras - Soleus Sauvignon Blanc (Central Valley - Chile)

With Mr. D. living just down the road from Marquis Wine Cellars, he can always be relied upon to bring an interesting bottle as a contribution to the dinner table. He's also good about checking the blog to see if a proposed bottle has already been added to The List.

Mont Gras is one of the Chilean producers that has a healthy presence in the Vancouver market. They have a number of brands - including Quatro, Mont Gras Reserva and De Gras - in addition to Soleus. I don't think I've run across the Soleus before but it produces three organically grown varietal wines: this Sauv Blanc, a Cab Sauv and a Merlot.

Showing typical, crisp Sauv Blanc notes of citrus, it may well be grown in a "green," organic manner, but it wasn't nearly as "green" on the palate as many of the New Zealand-esque Sauv Blancs available. You'd never mistake it for a reserved Sancerre, but it was a decent middle ground.

1403.  2001 Sandhill Small Lots - Phantom Creek Syrah (VQA Okanagan Valley)

Celebrating the new picnic table seemed to warrant pulling out a bottle from the bottom of our box of wines. Sandhill wines have always been faves of our's and I'm a little surprised that we still had a 2001 hanging around - especially since I think this might be the first Syrah produced under the Small Lots Program (Phantom Creek being a vineyard found on the Black Sage Road between Oliver and Osoyoos). I might be even more surprised that the wine still exhibited as much fruit as it did though.  That's not to say that the palate was laden with fruit though. I'm sure the bottle exhibited a lot more fruit earlier in its tenure.

But it's still early days as far as determining just how long BC wines are going to age though. Twelve years in, I think we can safely say that this bottle doesn't hurt the region's reputation for producing age-worthy wines.

I'm just going to hope that our picnic table can last as long without needed further replacement.