My Favourite Wines Tasted in 2015

This year is now coming to a close and although 2015 was relatively quiet in my world of wine, it brought much joy and surprise in other facets of life for me. On April 30, I discovered I was pregnant with my second child and in August, I was delighted to learn my baby is a girl! She will make her big arrival on December 30. She had me craving beer most of the pregnancy, future beer lover?

January 1-April 30 still had me busily exploring the world of wine. Some highlights included starting up a tasting group with fellow wine lovers in the late winter/early spring, visiting Jamaica's Appleton Estate Rum Distillery in February and attending a few local tasting events that focused on great value wines. I also made it back to the Okanagan in August and did some wine touring - thank goodness for spit buckets! 

Even with only 4 months of official tasting, I was able to put together a list of wines and pairings that stood out to me during the year. Here are my top wine picks of 2015!

Top Red Wines

Because my drinkable months occurred during the winter, my top picks favour red wines this year.  In fact, there were very few red wines I didn't enjoy in the first 3 months of 2015! The top two wines are priced in the premium category, while the other 3 are priced between $20 and $35 CDN.

1. Burrowing Owl Meritage 2011 - Oliver, British Columbia, Canada 

2. Joseph Phelps Insignia 1996 - Napa, California

3. Dominio de Tares Baltos Mencia 2011 - Bierzo, Spain

4. Silkscarf Malbec Cabernet 2009 - Summerland, British Columbia, Canada

5. Tiefenbrunner Pinot Noir Turmhof 2012 - Alto Adige, Italy

Top White Wines

Spain took the top 1 and 3 spots and French whites, including a Premier Cru, took 2nd and 4th place. All wines are priced under $40 CDN with the exception of the Burgundy, which is premium priced.

1. Bodegas Muga Blanco 2011 - Rioja, Spain

2. Domaine Bouchard Pere et Fils Meursault 1er Cru Genevrieres 2000 - Burgundy, France  

3. Bodegas Exopto Horizonte de Exopto 2012 - Rioja, Spain

4. Domaine Fouassier Les Romains 2012 - Sancerre, Loire Valley, France 

Because of my shortened "tasting season" this year, I wasn't able to spend as much time with sweet wines, sparkling wines or rose wines and will therefore not be adding these categories to my list this year. However, I did get to experiment with wine and food a fair bit, and here are my top picks for pairings.

Top Wine and Food Pairings

1. Pfaffenheim Gewurztraminer 2013 with Seafood Salad "Louis Style", served in Lettuce Boats

2. Domino Pinot Grigio 2012 with Honey-Lime Marinated Shrimp (v)

3. Tommasi Poggio al Tufo Rompicollo 2011 with Slow-Cooked BBQ Ribs (v)

Honourable Mention; Cameron Hughes Della Robbia semi-sweet Italian Rosso with Wagon Wheels (v)

*Don't knock this pairing until you try it! This pairing is great for camping!

Three of my top wines in the food pairing category happen to be value wines at under $20 per bottle, so my Top Values list is shortened to include the wines mentioned above. Australian Shirazes dominate the list, with a semi-sweet Tokaji clinching 3rd spot and a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc rounding out the category. 

Top Values

1. Wynn's Coonawarra Estate Cab Shiraz Merlot 2010 - Coonawarra, Australia

2. M Chapoutier Domaine Tournon "Mathilda" Shiraz 2010 - Victoria, Australia

3. Crown Estates Tokaji Sargamuskotaly semi-sweet 2011 - Hungary

4. Seven Terraces Sauvignon Blanc 2013 - Marlborough, New Zealand

This year I'm going to introduce 2 new categories: Top Spirits and Top Beers. You might be surprised at the number of Canadian spirits & beers on each list, but in my opinion Canada is really starting to make their mark on the world of spirits, especially in the world of Whisky. The top beers are courtesy of my husband, who tasted approximately 100 beers in 2015!

Top Spirits

1. Appleton Estate Rare Blend 12 Year Old Rum - St Elizabeth Parrish, Jamaica

2. Crown Royal Northern Harvest Rye - Gimli, Manitoba, Canada

3. Eau Claire Distillery Three Point Vodka - Turner Valley, Alberta, Calgary

Top Beers

1. Phillips Longboat Chocolate Porter - Victoria, BC, Canada

2. Ayinger Celebrator Doppelbock - Germany

3. Delerium Tremens - Belgium 

4. Granville Island Lions Winter Ale - Vancouver, BC, Canada

5. Erdinger Dunkel - Germany

So what's next for 2016? 

I plan to return to wine school through Fine Vintage Ltd and take their Canadian Wine Scholar Certification course in late 2016/early 2017. Therefore, my main focus will be on Canadian wines. Our major trip this year will be back to the Okanagan, where I will sample my way through the region and soak up as much knowledge as I can to study and prepare for the course. I am also hoping to spend some time in the Niagara region, should we make it back to my parents' place in Ontario.

Other regions I plan to focus on include Champagne, California, Italian food and wine pairings and Rioja, Spain. 

Huge thanks to all those who still follow me despite my long absence from the blog and twitter! May you have a 2016 filled with good food, good friends and great wine. Cheers!

A Tale of Two 3 Course Meals

Tale #1: A Cheddar "Battle"
Sommelier school is expensive. Really, really expensive. When I first expressed my interest in pursuing this passion to my husband, and after showing him the tuition costs, I really thought he would say no. After all, we are saving up for a new house and need all the money we can save for the down payment. And I'm not necessarily going to chase this as a new career path. However, to my surprise, he was very supportive of me and I just finished the Wine Fundamentals course through WSET! To thank him for his support and to show him that I did learn something in exchange for tuition fees, I cooked him a three course meal that focused on a couple forms of cheddar, complete with wine pairings.
First course was a slow-cooked French Onion Soup topped with broiled, mild cheddar on baguette slices, paired with a Chardonnay, 2008 Tinhorn Creek from BC. This chardonnay is medium bodied and doesn't go overboard with oaky flavors, and because of this I found it to be a great match with the soup, bringing out the rustic flavors of the onions. I'm not much on chard, but this one is great to pair with food or drink on it's own! Next time I will use a stronger cheddar for the soup, which I will make again!
Second course was a "grilled cheese" made with medium cheddar between grilled chicken breasts cut lengthwise in half. I marinated the chicken in a cocktail of Blanche de Chambly, a stronger Quebec beer, along with apple cider vinegar and a few herbs first, then my hubby grilled it on the barbecue. I served the chicken with fried butternut squash (sage was the main herb used for flavoring) and broccoli in a cheddar bearnaise sauce. The wine pairing was a merlot from chile, Anakena. Because the merlot was a 2009 it was very mild, soft tannins, and mild fruit flavors with a hint of spice. But it still held up to the flavors of the cheddar and I thought it paired well. Here's what it looked like:

Dessert was an apple crisp with mild cheddar woven into the topping. I don't think I will ever make an apple crisp without cheese in it ever again! I wanted to pair it with my sacred bottle of Robert Renzoni's 2008 La Rosa, a 2008 Californian rose made with Sangiovese grapes. But because this is the bottle that has the Renzoni autograph on it (and I don't know when I'm going to that area of California again), I couldn't pull the cork, so to speak!

So despite the missing wine pairing with dessert, the meal turned out well and needless to say, my husband was all full up in the end!

Tale #2: The Easter Parade of Pairings
The title comes from my dad, who used to sing the Easter Parade song to me and my sisters every year. Even though I live 3,000kms away now, he still "sang" it to me in the Easter card he sent. Easter is a big holiday for my family. They all get together, have a feast, and they never forget the wine! Easter is one of the three days I get a little homesick, not being able to to join in the fun back home. To help ease the homesickness, I made us a 3 course meal, and I didn't forget the wine pairings either! I chose to do a "best of" theme for our food adventures this past year, with hints of my Ukranian background to complement the meal.
First course was kielbasa and brick cheese infused with onion and parsley, paired with an Australian Shiraz, Wyndham Estate's 2008 Bin 555. Originally I wanted to pair it with a more mellow red since I find Shiraz has quite a bite for my tasting with it's peppery notes. This wine still maintains the quality of a good Shiraz, without slapping you in the face with spice. It paired decently well with the kielbasa and cheese, but I think I'll keep trying different wines to pair with kielbasa in the future.
For the main course, I took a chicken breasts supreme, pan-seared it skin side down, and then roasted it in the oven with butter and a sauce, a reduction of honey and white wine, flavored with rosemary. I continued basting the chicken with the reduction as it roasted, and topped it with the sauce when serving it. Very sticky, but very sweet! This chicken breast recipe is actually found in Anthony Sedlak's The Main cookbook, so props to him for coming up with it! I served the chicken over roasted garlic mashed yams, topped with bacon bits for a smokier flavor-after all, the chicken was super sweet, and I didn't want to go overkill on the sweetness. The side was paska, a ukranian raisin bread that we munched on after the official main. Here's what it looked like:
The wine pairing was my personal favorite white: Hernder Estate's 2008 Vidal, which you can only get in Ontario. It's light to medium bodied, very floral in bouquet with a sassy hint of lime. It's sweet but not overly sweet, so it brought out the sweetness of the chicken without making the main taste too sweet.
Dessert was originally going be a spiced banana rum cake, but since we still had chocolate fudge cake leftover from Friday night's family dinner, we ate that instead and paired it with a rum and coke to help kill the sugary flavors. A fantastic ending for a fantastic dinner!

Now it's time for me to take a break from three course dinners with wine pairings. Back to the regular family tradition of Slow Cooker Sunday, which will be my personal take on my nana's "Floating Chicken". Now off to the wine store to pick up the wine I'm going to use in that recipe!