Chris D.
Yelp
My girlfriend and I were on vacation through Okanagan wine country. Over six days, we visited sixty wineries. You can follow our various locations with this disclaimer. That's sixty wineries, not an exaggeration. What's the biggest lesson to take back from it? For one, don't feel pressured to buy wine from every winery, because you end up trying to squeeze almost a hundred bottles into a tiny Nissan versa note. Once you include the boxes we had shipped, it ended up being 120 bottles. Now that the Wines of BC department of Save On is found basically across the province, there is no reason to purchase outside of those unique bottles found only at the wineries. We don't regret our purchases; they just made transportation rather difficult.
Less than two kilometers from Burrowing Owl, two minutes away (okay, more like thirty seconds the way I drive), is Black Hills Estate winery, and no two wineries could be more different. Where Burrowing Owl tries to replicate the village from Three Amigos, Black Hills is modern, though in no way plain or less interesting.
It's what I like about this region of Okanagan wine country, every location is different, every one a surprise. The tasting room is picturesque with wall-to-wall glass revealing not the dystopian panorama of a Phillip K Dickian urban sprawl, but rather romanticized and obviously hyperbolized endless rolling hills draped in vines.
The Blade Runner metaphor apropos given Black Hills' brutalist yet diminutive concrete walls and sharp edges broken up by simplistic black signs. Past the tasting area is a modest dining balcony outfitted with water spritzers to cool the patrons. Past that the sapphire pool (which they arbitrarily call a water feature, probably because they don't let people swim) and fringing dark gazebos (or cabanas if you thought I was talking about gazelles) where the girlfriend and I found ourselves.
Yes, we opted for the most expensive wine pairing, the VIP, and it was barely an hour past noon. An educated and shadow-shrouded man (we're low, he's high, and there's sun) walked us through six generous portions of wine, three reds and three whites. Very generous portions. He explained the desert-like conditions of the region and the various techniques used in the making of the wines we sampled, all while the two us sunk deeper into incoherence, more the girlfriend than me, explaining why she opted out of the next two wineries.
The wine was memorable, though in the end, we ended up picking up only four bottles, all white, two known as Alias while the others chardonnays. No reds, very astute--we just weren't feeling them at Black Hills. I love the simplistic yet effective décor, and their whites are worth investigating, but the reds just didn't win us over.
Despite obviously less than Burrowing Owl, Black Hills is still a must-see location in the region.
