Township 7, Naramata

Contributed - Oct 15, 2017 / 5:00 am | Story: 209139

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: Merlot, 2015

Winery: Township 7, Naramata

Why drink it? Merlot should be a red wine staple as soon as the first reports of snow start coming in and the search for warm comfort begins. Ripe notes of dark cocoa nibs and raspberry jam compete with a light scent of light cigar leaves as you swirl and sniff this deep garnet-coloured wine. Have a glass handy as you prepare a fall harvest dinner, and enjoy flavours of dark plums and ripe red berries, followed by vanilla bean and a bit of dark chocolate. If you’ve stayed away from Merlot because it’s “too big” for your tastebuds, welcome back with this balanced bottle and its soft finish.

Price: $23

Pair with: The winery suggests “seared blueberry duck breast”, but if that’s too fancy, simply pair with beef stew full of roasted fall veggies, spiced with bay leaf and local garlic scape salt, with a side of roasted baby potatoes and plans to watch a movie later.

Classic CanCon music pairing: Make You a Believer, Sass Jordan

Have a wine you'd like to suggest? Contact us at [email protected], and we will put you in touch with our wine writer.

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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.