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Monday, May 11, 2009

Bottle Shock Canadian Style

On a cold winter day in Montreal in January 2009, a restaurant named La Colombe was the scene of an upset rivaling the one in 1976 Paris of French wines by California's Chateau Montelena.
Le Clos Jordanne's Claystone Terrace 2005 Chardonnay beat out both French and California wines to take first place at a blind tasting nick named The Judgment of Montreal. This wine was secretly inserted into the tasting line up fooling the judges into thinking they were drinking a Burgundy.
The vines this wine came from were planted only in the year 2000. It is normaly expected vines should be around 15 years old before top quality can be achieved. The
Canaduan wine competed against wine from California which has been made for decades and against Burgundy which has been producing wine for centuries.
My closest experience to this kind of thing was purchasing Magnotta's Millenium Cabertnet Sauvignon which wound up beating first growth Bordeaux in a blind tasting.
That wine was made from grapes that came from Chile but was made in Canada (to my knowledge).
People should not be surprised that Canadian wineries are making top quality product. World class recognition for Canadian wines will happen again with absolute certainty.
Click the title of this post for the Le Clos Jordanne website