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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

2 comments:

melmary said...

Is it true that this was just really a tasting for the Quebec "LCBO"? It is great for the industry that Le Clos beat out the French and American wines, but this is getting no publication or acknowledgment in the US or France. It was not a set up tasting, with real media coverage of a US vs France event.
Again coming from a small local winery in NOTL I want us to succeed and do well and get the respect we deserve, but I think this event is not being told true to what it is.

Youngdaggit said...

http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/May2009/07/c9486.html

"Cellier is published four times a year by Transcontinental Media on behalf of the SAQ and has a circulation of 90,000."

Yes there is relationship with the
Quebec SAQ.
As far as I'm concerned it doesn't matter. There is nothing I can see that takes away from the legitimacy from the results.
Blogs like this one will carry the word to people around the world via the web.