This bottle is interesting. It’s a great example of how marketing wine is more imporant than wine of character in the new world. I completely understand the profit driven aspect of this, but it’s too bad that this has become a ‘visible’ norm of Canadian wine.
My impression is that this is a perfect example of what happens when a vineyard produces super high-yields. You get lots of product per hectare – which is good for economics, but bad for flavour. I applaud their effort to ‘unoak’ wine varietals we know, but it’s disappointing that this is how they’re doing it. They’re not producing low-yield, high quality grapes of concentrated flavour to represent ‘unoaked merlot’. They’re blasting out copious quantities of generic merlot and marketing it well. Oh well. Could be worse. My tasting notes are online.