Road 13 Winery, which is located between Oliver and Osoyoos, has been voted as Canada’s third best winery at a prestigious national wine awards competition.
The 16th annual WineAlign National Wine Awards were held this year at the Penticton Trade and Convention Centre in the heart of the Okanagan Valley in late June.
The winners from that competition were announced earlier this week.
Over 1,500 wines were tasted blind (producer, origin, price hidden) by 21 wine critics and educators from seven provinces, plus guest judges Dr. Jamie Goode of the U.K. and Elaine Chukan Brown from California.
There were 16 platinum medals awarded (outstanding), 103 golds (excellent) and many, many more silver and bronze medals all identifying ‘very good’ wines.
The runner-up for Best Winery, and winner of the award for Best Performance by a Small Winery (less than 10,000 case annual production) was Lake Breeze Winery, located on the Naramata Bench of British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley.
Each year the results are tallied to seek out the wineries consistently making the best wines. The top five scoring wines from each winery are assigned a ‘performance score’ weighted by medal ‘worth’. As well as determining the top winery by this method, WineAlign has published a list of the top 25 wineries of the 230 entered in the competition.
This is hallowed territory and rankings in the Top 10 went 50-50 to British Columbia and Ontario wineries.
Road 13 Vineyards was awarded two platinum medals, one gold, five silver and two bronze.
Moon Curser Vineyards from Osoyoos was voted as the 12th best winery in the country as they received two gold medals, three silver and two bronze.
Church and State Wines between Oliver and Osoyoos finished 14th in the country and captured two gold medals, nine silver and one bronze.
Burrowing Owl Winery, located between Oliver and Osoyoos, finished 19th and captured two gold medals, two silver and three bronze.
Blasted Church Winery, located near Okanagan Falls, finished 22nd and captured two gold medals and two silvers.
A total of 230 wineries across Canada were involved in the awards competition.
Each performance score began with the wine’s raw base score as awarded by the judges out of 100 points. Then, employing a series of calculations, the wine receives additional points depending upon whether or not it was awarded a bronze, silver, gold or platinum medal.
The value of any medal takes into account the total number of medals awarded in each class and the total number of medals issued overall to produce a unique performance score.
That total, added together with a winery’s other four top scoring wines, is used to assess its performance against all others entered in the competition, resulting in the list of top performing wineries.
KEITH LACEY
Special to the Chronicle
