Black Cloud Wine: 2006 Pinot Noir

OWS started to Twitter about three months ago, maybe a bit more - I can't remember exactly. The whole social networking thing is a bit strange, but it's a place to have conversation, to explore language, so I'm all over it. Well, as all over it as I can be without a mobile communication device. Yes, I still update everything through the tired, old laptop. No cell phone for me.

Through this world of Twitter I have discovered a cornucopia of exciting things in and around the Okanagan. Somehow, a whole other world opened up - like pulling on the thread in your sweater and realizing just how long it is...and what it's connected to.

One Twitter-er (should I call them Twits? I'm still not sure) I met is a winemaker at a Naramata winery called Township7. Me and the OWS hubby have enjoyed their wines in the past, and in the present. I found a 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon particularly delicious about two weeks ago as I was in the midst of writing a ridiculous amount of prose.

This fellow, who goes by the Twitter handle @bradinator (aka Bradley Cooper), decided to start up his own label outside of Township7. I was immediately intrigued. A new winery? Let me at it.

After a few false starts I managed to get myself to Township7 Mr. Cooper's new wine - Black Cloud Wine - is made under license. I was fortunate enough this past weekend to swing by the winery, snag a couple of Township7 bottles and some of bottles of the BCloud - as well as meet the notorious Mr. Cooper himself.

The inaugural vintage is a 2006 Pinot Noir. As you may note from my previous post, I'm not a wine writer, wine critic, nor am I schooled in any form of wine review. Which, I think, is just fine and dandy. I can't speak to the complexity of this wine, or the balance - or any other structural component. Instead, I can speak to what it speaks to in me.

The wine is a delicious looking garnet colour as it pours into the glass, like a liquid jewel. I let it sit on the counter for about 30 minutes as I did some dishes - like a good friend, it sat with me in the kitchen as I cleaned up.

I took a sniff and immediately thought of fruit stands in July. The kind of fruit stand where the fruit is achingly ripe, spilling over the edges of those little green boxes and waiting to stain your jeans. If you haven't had that experience, find it. My own memory dug up images of boating on long weekends as a kid in Ontario, through the Trent-Severn waterways. We would always take a huge bag of cherries on the boat (when in season), and this smelled like that bag of cherries after they had sat in the warmth of the sun. Mmmm.

By the time I took a sip of the Pinot Noir I was already on the dock under the summer sun, remembering the feeling of jumping off the end of the dock and into the cool water of the lake. Sometimes I still had a handful of cherries as I surfaced. There's nothing like that feeling.

It's that kind of wine. Sure, it's the last day of November and reaching temperatures below zero at night. And I haven't been barefoot for an entire day since late September - okay, maybe early October, but that was pushing it. But delving into this liquid jewel is like taking that long summer weekend and extending it by a day, or two. The stolen days that always feel so much better than the planned ones.

Grab yourself a bottle of Black Cloud Pinot Noir, and join the maiden voyage. Let me know what your memories are; the ones you make with the wine, and the ones the wine makes with you.

Cheers.


~Jeannette