Amphora Chenin Blanc 2025

Wine Profile

Chenin Blanc makes up less than 1% of the white varieties grown in BC. It ripens mid season and is generally associated with cool climate wine growing regions. This fruit comes from a single block at McIntyre Vineyard in OK Falls.

Tasting Notes

Our third release of Chenin Blanc has savory aromas of onion skins and beeswax along with notes of white grapefruit and lime zest. The palate is just as savory with wet stone and white peach flavors ahead of notes of honeycomb. Pair the bright and juicy flavors of this wine with your favorite seafood, such as fresh oysters and sushi. 

Winemaking notes

The grapes for this small lot were whole cluster pressed and fermented using wild yeast in clay Amphora. The long and slow fermentation allowed for lots of lees stirring and a partial malolactic fermentation to occur. The wine was aged sur lie in the Amphora a further 4 months before bottling.

Vintage notes

Following a vintage with almost no wine grapes at all, the 2025 vintage in the Okanagan Valley produced a bumper crop. The valley experienced a mild winter thankfully, after the devastating deep freeze of 2024, allowing the surviving vines to rebound and the new plantings to establish themselves. Spring came early, followed by a warm summer and fall producing very high growing degree days without extreme heat spikes that we have had in previous summers. With the favourable conditions came a lot of vigour in the vineyards, requiring careful attention to shoot and bunch thinning. A couple of our varieties exhibited early shrivel or variable skin colouring which may have been a sign of the stress that the vines are still recovering from in the deep freeze of 2024.

Harvest started on September 2nd with our Chardonnay portion of the traditional method sparkling, Market Bubble. Our white and rose wines have nice intensity and balance this year, with a beautiful freshness on the palate. While the reds are aging in barrel, they are showing ripeness in the fruit character and tannin structure with an elegance like the 2022 vintage reds that we produced. Overall, 2025 was a nice reprieve from the two previous short crop vintages, providing a full production of our Laughing Stock wines.

Vineyards

Sourced from a single block at McIntyre Vineyard in Ok Falls