Hello Old Friend!

Black Hills white blend has been around for 12 years€”and it continues to be the standard-bearer for looking for elegance in their Sauvignon Blanc.

Black Hills Alibi 2015 $21.65We’re still a new wine region, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have our iconic wines—a category this wine definitely falls into. I’m old enough to recall when it first came out back in 2003 and the idea of “white blends” was a relatively new phenomena. This wine’s older brother—Black Hill’s Nota Bene—had already established itself as arguably B.C.’s first cult wine and some of that buzz stuck to Alibi, making it a somewhat tricky bottle to come by. This was pre-New Zealand’s Sauvignon Blanc explosion, when people’s idea of how the grape should taste came from the rocky gravel of Sancerre and Pouilly Fume. But Black Hills looked to a different wine region—Bordeaux—for their inspiration and decided to add a portion (usually 25%) of Semillon to their wine, just as they do in the great and pricey wines of Graves.It was an inspired choice in retrospect. The marriage of these two produces a depth of flavours—dried mango, fresh papaya, lemon rind—that most modern Sauvignon Blanc’s skip over to achieve their signature gooseberry and fruit wallop. I’d love to taste a bottle of this wine from one of the early vintages because my sneaking suspicion is that it would age wonderfully, but the best I can do is buy two of this year’s offering—one for drinking and one for putting down.