Last month's Sun Peaks Okanagan Winter Wine Festival yielded a wealth of tastings that included everything from ice wine and Bordeaux style blending sessions to cheese and chocolate.
With Canadian wine goes Canadian cheese, for sure. For Canadian cheese with B.C. Syrah, I matched each of six VQA Syrahs with a 100 per cent Canadian milk cheese. It was a fun experience, and while I wasn't sure if the matches (planned ahead without tasting) would work in every case, I was pleased to find that for the most part they worked very well.
In wine terms, Syrah has a relatively brief history in B.C., which prior to the early '90s was producing little in the way of palatable reds, with the exception of a few hybrids such as Chancellor (made, incidentally, by Calona's Howard Soon).
However, in 1991, Alex and Kathleen Nichol proved the naysayers wrong with the first successful Syrah planting on the Naramata Bench. They proved beyond a doubt that you could grow good Syrah in B.C., like anything else, as long as it was in the right place, in this case a hot spot below a steep hill.
In 2004, the Syrah acreage stood at 191 acres and it's now the fifth most planted red grape in the province with almost 600 acres planted and accounts for about 10 per cent of the total red grape production.
Some of that momentum came from the remarkable success of Aussie Shiraz, which is widely credited for turning a whole generation on to wine. Most of the time in B.C., we refer to the variety as "Syrah," which tends to be a deliberate nod towards a cooler climate style. Our Syrahs may not be as big and bold and juicy (although some are) and they tend to look towards Rhone rather than Barossa.
Much of Syrah's B.C. success can also be credited to our growing appetite for more food-friendly styles. While it may start out with big, bold and juicy dark berry notes, underneath there can be great structure and that streak of Okanagan acidity, as well as a hallmark peppery note. All that means it can also be a slam dunk for cheese.
Some fun matches from the seminar included: Road 13 with Boursin pepper that played perfectly off the wine's black pepper notes; CC Jentsch Syrah 2012, whose smokiness nicely matched Bothwell's Extra Old Maple Smoked Cheddar; and Quebec's Fromagerie L'Ancêtre, a superb three-year-old cheddar, whose sharp edge but sweet, rich body proved ideal with the structure, weight and juiciness of Sandhill Small Lots Phantom Creek 2012. Next time you're planning some wine and cheese, you would do well to track down a couple of these. I've never been a real fan of wine and chocolate,
well, not entirely. But a session with Steve Venables of Similkameen's Forbidden Fruit Winery and Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory proved more than seductive, and also that seriously well-made fruit wines can be the perfect match for various styles of quality chocolate.
The star of the show (and a slam dunk for Valentine's Day): Forbidden Fruit Cerise d'Eve with dark chocolate. And a close second: Forbidden Fruit Impearfection, with dark chocolate and ginger cluster.
I've long been a fan of this unique, all organic (mainly fruit) winery, which is nestled on a stunningly beautiful site on the edge of the Similkameen River, just east of Cawston. Take time to visit next time you're in the area. Better still, take a picnic and enjoy what they've created. Find the wines at better private wine stores.
Tim Pawsey writes about wine for numerous publications and online as the Hired Belly at hiredbelly.com. Contact: info@hiredbelly.com.
