Burrowing Owl, Oliver

Contributed - Feb 26, 2017 / 5:00 am | Story: 189239

Photo: Contributed

For Canada’s 150th birthday this year, Castanet is featuring an Okanagan wine each week, celebrating the bottles of our Valley and the diversity of the Canadian wine industry, including suggested food pairings and Canadian music artist to listen to while enjoying a glass. For current availability, consult the winery.

Wine: Chardonnay, 2014

Winery: Burrowing Owl, Oliver

Why drink it? Love it or hate it, if you’re part of the “ABC” – anything but chardonnay – crowd, chards come both oaked and unoaked. The latter is often a mix of flinty citrus, but the former? When you find an oaked chardonnay that is balanced and integrated, it is a glass to behold. This one shows ripe stone fruits and tropical notes, with a vanilla-caramel aspect from the oak aging, only on 60 percent of the juice. Need a fancy wine term? Just say, ‘malolactic’ fermentation; a second ferment of some of the wine brings forth the soft butter notes. A skillfully crafted chard, this is a good one for taste buds just trying on oak for size, and is great value for the price.

Price: $25

Pair with: The winey suggests crab or scallops. If you’re handy in the kitchen, fire up a creamy seafood risotto, grilled fish, or a chicken dish doused in an indulgent cream sauce. Snacking? Treat yourself to some roasted nuts – macadamias and almonds – or a soft, creamy cheese.

Classic cancon music pairing: Romantic Traffic, Spoons

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About the Author

As a kid, Shelley Boettcher often found herself in the back seat of a pick-up, exploring the back roads of the Okanagan Valley with her parents. They’d occasionally leave her and her brother in the car while they stopped at mysterious addresses to buy wine. They would emerge, clearly happy, as they stuck a box or a few bottles in the vehicle. Then they would continue on their journey.

But it wasn’t until a trip to Spain in 2000 that Shelley herself fell in love with wine. She came home from the holiday and promptly told her editor she wanted to become a wine writer.

And she did.

An award-winning food and wine writer and editor, Shelley holds her master’s degree in journalism and her advanced WSET certification, as well as her level 2 International Sommelier Guild certification. A wine columnist for the Calgary Herald, she spent a decade as CBC Radio’s national syndicated wine columnist and she has written three books about wine, including two that were Canadian bestsellers. Her byline has appeared in magazines and newspapers around the world, including the New York Times, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail and Postmedia newspapers across Canada.

Shelley has travelled throughout many of the world’s wine regions and countries, including Niagara, Oregon, Washington, California, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Australia, Germany, Argentina and the Republic of Georgia. A few years ago, she even tracked down and visited a winery in Denmark.

Shelley has also served as a professional wine judge regionally and internationally, including the Okanagan Wine Festivals, Vinitaly and the Chianti Classico Consortium. For more than a decade, she has been a restaurant wine list judge for the Vancouver International Wine Festival, too. She still teases her parents for sparking her love for wine, especially BC wine.

And her favourite? Whatever she's drinking at the moment.

You can follow Shelley on Instagram @shelleyboettcher or Twitter at @shelley_wine.

If you have a BC wine you’d like to suggest, email Shelley at [email protected] with the name of the wine and a short note about why you enjoyed it.