With Boo actively trying to enforce his "No Buy Leash" on my wine purchasing tendencies, it's been some time since I've bought La Frenz by the case - even when it's by the mixed case. As such, I haven't been able to pick up a bottle of the winery's Alexandria for some years. Although the Muscat of Alexandria grape isn't highly planted in BC, the fair bit of it that is grown generally is used in making the popular Okanagan white blends.
La Frenz makes one of the few straight varietal wines that I'm aware of and it has become somewhat of a cult favourite. If you don't order a case of La Frenz wines, you pretty much have to visit the winery - shortly after the wine is released - because there isn't a lot of it made and it inevitably sells out long before the Fall arrives.
Part of its popularity is that the wine consistently serves up a whack of fruit on both the nose and the palate and it leaves some residual sugar that matches nicely with the spicy ethnic foods that are plentiful in Vancouver. La Frenz owner and winemaker, Jeff Martin, only enters his wines in a couple of competitions and he usually only enters the tougher ones where the medals might be seen as actually meaning something. This 2012 vintage pulled in Gold at both the 2013 All Canadian Wine Championships and the 2013 Northwest Wine Summit. Not a bad haul for a grape that very few drinkers would recognize.
As such, I was rather shocked when I saw a bottle for sale on Salt Spring Island the other week. "No Buy Leash" or not, I grabbed it and offered up a big "thank you" to the shop.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment