Road Trip to Washington & Oregon
Last week our winemaker, Alison, went on a wine adventure. She travelled across the border to Washington and Oregon, visiting the best AVA regions in search of premium, boutique-style Chardonnay grapes.
Like many wineries, the vines in our Solvero vineyards suffered bud damage as a result of to two back-to-back winters that featured very frigid cold snaps. As a result, Alison is hoping to source grapes that will be hand-harvested and processed to juice under her direction. She will be present during the harvesting and processing to ensure our Solvero standards are met.
The juice from the Chardonnay grapes will then be cold shipped to our winery where we will ferment it as normal. Our labelling will accurately reflect the specific vineyard location and year the grapes were sourced from. This will be a temporary measure to help us continue to offer wine while our vineyards recover. It will be fun and interesting to make wine from premium grapes sourced from another region.
We are working on “retrunking” our vines so they can be back in production for 2025. In the meantime, we are looking to fill the gap and keep a sustainable Solvero supply on the shelf for our loyal wine club members, customers and accounts. We also have back vintages of some our own wines on hand. As a small winery, we do anticipate to sell out of certain wines every year but we assure you, we will continue to have quality wine available for you.
What is an AVA?
An AVA is an “American Viticultural Area” – a designated grape-growing region with specific geographic or climactic features that set it apart from other regions.
This is much like British Columbia’s own Designated Viticultural Areas, or DVAs as we know them here, also called sub-Geographical Indications (or sub-GIs) that are now part of the VQA program in BC.
An AVA name on a bottle of wine means a minimum 85% of the grapes in the wine have all come from that one specific region. BC requires 95% of the grapes to be from the DVA region for the name to appear on the label.
What is Retrunking?
Many of the vines in the valley that sustained bud damage from the cold are pushing new shoots from the ground. You may have seen this on social media or in your travels around the Okanagan Valley.
Retrunking is using the new shoots from the base of the vine to replace the existing damaged trunk.
The new shoots grow from the established root stock and will push fruit in the following year, unlike planting brand new vines which takes at least 2-3 years before they produce viable grapes. Once the new shoot is established, the original trunk is removed.