The
Fort Wine Company
By Jenise
Stone
“You get to select three wines to taste,” our
hostess at The Fort Wine Company’s tasting room,
located about five minutes from the old fort at Langley,
B.C., cheerfully announced. I, who up until last Tuesday
hated non-grape fruit wines, eyed the menu trying to
figure out  which would involve the least suffering. To
stall for time, I whipped out my business card. “Oh,
you write?,” she said, “then you get to taste
everything.” My tongue recoiled in horror.
Needlessly, as it turned out, as years of dislike formed
by run-ins with sugary, sometimes oxidized or bretty
or sulfurous, sometimes badly fortified (vodka, anyone?)
made by well-meaning friends and family members, as well
as numerous unimpressive commercial efforts, just melted
away. These wines tasted like real wine because they
ARE real wine. Expertly so.
Originally just a working cranberry farm
(still is), the winery started six years ago with wines
from that
fruit and slowly built on its success with other local
fruit (the blueberries come from two doors down) and
tree fruit from the warmer Okanagan Valley. Derek Powen
was the founding winemaker but the reins have recently
been handed to Richard Roseweir, whom we got a chance
to chat with. He makes six dry to off-dry wines, and
six sweeter dessert wines. The dry wines all report in
at a light 11% alcohol, where the stickies (that’s
geek talk for dessert wine) are 16%.
I liked every single one of them. So much so that I
came home with the white cranberry, cranberry and blueberry
dry wines plus a sticky.
The white cranberry is the palest pink,
made from juvenile cranberries picked in early August
when some of the berries
start turning pink, and it tastes of cranberries and
pink grapefruit. It’s tangy with a hint of a semillon-like
floral note and a pleasantly bitter finish. The red cranberry
is medium rose in color and true to the fruit, with a
fruitier mid-palate. The blueberry, in spite of being
made only from 100% blueberries, had a nose of sweet
fruit and aged white cheddar, and tasted of blueberry
and raspberry. I’m going to save this for an after
dinner cheese plate. Additionally, they make dry wines
from apple, peach/apricot and strawberry.
All the same fruits show up in the fine
dessert line (fortified with grain alcohol). I limited
myself to three
wines here and followed my hostess’ recommendations.
First, a brilliant blackberry “port”. This
is the one wine made here that sees oak treatment, and
the wine tastes of blackberry crumble and walnuts. An
apple ice wine (they freeze the fruit to remove water
and enhance concentration) tasted of both red and green
apple skins plus a lovely streak of cinnamon. My personal
favorite was the wine they call Gold Rush. Made from
peaches and apricots, this orange-gold nectar tasted
of peach, apricot skin, hazelnuts, celery seed and brandy.
Very complex, very impressive.
So who doesn’t like fruit wines?
Not me!
You
can visit the:
The Fort Wine Co.
26151 84th Ave
Langley, BC V1M 3M6
(604) 857-1101
or on the web at www.thefortwineco.com
-----------------------------------------------
(10-21-2006)
Jenise
Stone is a wine enthusiast and avid foodie who lives
in Birch Bay, Washington. She can be reached by emailing jenise@tasteofwhatcom.com.
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