It's time for another "Ottawa Tastes" opportunity, where Citizen readers get to judge wine. We've done this several times in the last few years, and recently had a few requests for another. So here it is.
To participate, all you have to do is buy a bottle of Cave Spring Cabernet/Merlot 2004 and test drive it over the weekend. Try it straight from the bottle or decant it first, as you prefer. Taste it by itself or with food — or, better still, both in turn. Then send me your comments on the wine (my e-mail address is below) and a score out of five stars, as follows:
**** I really enjoyed this wine, and I'll buy more now and again.
*** This was good, but it won't become a favourite.
** I didn't care for this too much.
* Never suggest I buy this wine again!
You can use half-stars, too, if you want. And please send me your scores and comments by Monday.
If you taste this wine with other people, you can send me all their scores and comments. If you taste it with food, I'd like to know what you ate and how you thought the match worked. Again, if there were several of you, feel free to send all the scores and comments.
For your information, my sense is that this is a pretty versatile wine as far as food goes. I could see drinking it with red meats, chicken, pork, or turkey, as well as with rich vegetarian dishes, pizza, or pasta with a meat- or mushroom-based sauce.
Like many wines, I think this is made for food, although it's not a bad idea to taste it alone first.
As for the scoring, I'm really more interested in whether you liked the wine than any assessment of whether it is well-made or has flavours that are typical of the blend. (In this case, by the way, it's Cabernet Franc and Merlot.)
Wine reviewers normally score wines by their assessment of quality, rather than by whether they like them. Most of us prefer some styles over others and some grape varieties over others, so simply scoring by preference wouldn't be of much use to readers. In this case, though, I am simply interested in how much you like or don't like the wine.
One thing to bear in mind -- and this is true of nearly all Ontario wines -- is that Ontario is a cool-climate wine region. We rarely produce big, fruity, intense red wines like Australian Shirazes, California Cabernets or Chilean Merlots. But Ontario wines often go better with food than the big fruity blockbusters that sometimes just swamp food flavours.
More than 500 readers participated in each of the past few "Ottawa Tastes" that I've conducted, and I look forward to getting your take on the Cave Spring Cabernet/Merlot.
I mentioned a few weeks ago that a friend reported that Air Canada was serving "Cellared in Canada" wines in Executive Class, and that the cabin crew was describing them as "Canadian" or "Ontario" wines (whereas they're mainly foreign wines blended with a little Ontario).
I recently travelled from Paris to Montreal on Air Canada and found the same thing. It really is appalling, and it's another reason why there should be more transparency (i.e., honesty) in the labelling of Canadian wine.