News

The fastest-growing critter in the wine-store jungle is a copper-coloured horse with gangly legs and an unusually trim body.

Depending on your perspective, it may also be either one of the best-value brands in Canada or a monster mutation out to destroy fine drink as we know it.

Wild Horse Canyon, created by a B.C. company, proudly flouts the smaller-is-always-better winemaking dogma, blending grapes not just from within a country, but from British Columbia, Washington State and California.

They're calling it a "West Coast" wine, a quaffer without borders.

So far, the concept sure looks like a winner. After little more than a year since its launch, Wild Horse Canyon is the No. 3 seller in the $10-to-$13 category in British Columbia. It's overtaken such established brands as Little Penguin and Banrock Station from Australia and Woodbridge from California. Now it's nipping at the Australian heels of No. 2 Lindemans and "critter label" phenomenon Yellow Tail, the bestselling wine in Canada.

At $12.95, Wild Horse Canyon, which arrived in Ontario three months ago and is heading eastward, has much to recommend it, not least a nicely balanced flavour that doesn't taste bland or confected like so many mass-produced blends.

Whereas many other value-oriented big brands concocted in boardrooms, such as Yellow Tail, contain ever-so-subtle quantities of sugar to appeal to non-traditional drinkers (while letting consumers believe they're drinking a dry, grown-up wine), Wild Horse Canyon wines actually finish dry.

They also finish well in tasting competitions. The Merlot just won a best-in-class double gold medal at the International Eastern Wine Competition.

"I think they're fabulous quality for the price," said Stephen Wilson, director of operations for glo group of restaurants and pubs, which operates glo Europub and two Med Grill restaurants in Victoria. Mr. Wilson says the sauvignon blanc and shiraz are hot sellers at $6.75 by the glass. "Nothing comes close to it in the price range."

The labels themselves, while zoologically themed, wouldn't embarrass a self-respecting wine drinker at the checkout.

"We wanted to have a label that was appealing and memorable, but in a classy and upscale way," said Kim Kapoor, vice-president of marketing for Artisan Wine Co., part of the business empire associated with Anthony von Mandl, owner of Mission Hill winery near Kelowna, B.C., where Wild Horse Canyon wines are blended and bottled. The horse image is not based on a cartoon, like so many critter labels, but on an aboriginal petroglyph (or rock engraving).

Even the horse's subtle copper colour is a tad more sophisticated than the neon or tacky aspirational gold foil so prevalent in the under-$15 category. The whole effect is more Chaps by Ralph Lauren than, say, Lion King sweats by Disney.

But the greater significance of the brand, I think, is the liberty it takes with that most sacrosanct of winemaking principles, terroir.

If you've been stuck at a dinner party next to loud wine bores, you are familiar with the word. French for "land" or "soil", it usually gets more loosely translated as "a sense of place," as in "a wine should taste like it came from a specific place." Australia's McLaren Vale shirazes, for example, should taste spicier than fat fruit bombs from Barossa.

Taken to the limit, terroir can be an arcane thing, as it is in Burgundy. Top wines from that French region are almost always made in small quantities from the fruit of a specific vineyard, like Clos de Tart or Montrachet.

Crusty, rubber-boot Burgundians believe the worst crime is to blend grapes that were grown more than about 80 kilometres apart, even if it might mean better flavour. What you might gain by improving dreck from a rain-diluted vineyard with concentrated fruit from a dry, sunny one you will lose in the intellectual thrill of savouring, say, what a really bad, overpriced 1975 Clos de Tart actually tastes like.

Think of Burgundians as dog breeders. They'd be scandalized to see a Bedlington terrier cavorting with a bichon frise, even if in all likelihood the resulting mutt might make a more cuddly cross than the parents. They don't give out gold ribbons for mutts at dog shows, after all.

Still, I think Wild Horse Canyon deserves a ribbon - for value pricing and truth in labelling. By blending grapes from three regions, the winemakers have more flexibility to source better grapes each year and take advantage of the best prices within the three regions.

In that sense, it's doing what many "Canadian" wineries currently do, sourcing as much as 70 per cent foreign product from Chile, blending it with domestic juice and labelling it "cellared in Canada." They even get preferential placement on the domestic shelves of liquor stores. All perfectly legal, if misleading.

Wild Horse Canyon, by contrast, wears its origin explicitly on its label. Consumers know where the wines come from because it says on the label.

To call them terroir wines might be a stretch. But you might label them wines with a macro-terroir flavour, unless of course a Burgundian is sitting within earshot.

Yet the most exciting thing about the brand may be its export potential. If Artisan decides to start distributing Wild Horse Canyon south of the border, the shrewd "West Coast Appellation" designation on the label (not legally meaningful, by the way) would be a much easier sell for a dry table wine than "product of Canada."

In other words, Wild Horse could be the Trojan horse that brings B.C. wine to the American table.

bcrosariol@globeandmail.com

*****

Tasting notes

Wild Horse Canyon

Sauvignon Blanc 2006

$12.95 (Ontario and the West)Light and fresh, slightly fleshy texture with good weight, fruit-forward, with a crisp, herbal-citrus finish. Nice, crowd-pleasing style.

Wild Horse Canyon Merlot 2005 $12.95

Big fruit impression at first, with notes of plums and berries, then balancing acidity and hints of spice and earth. Hard to find decent merlot at this price.

Wild Horse Canyon Shiraz 2005 $12.95

Good shiraz for the money, medium-full, ripe, soft and round. Fruity core with notes of pepper, vanilla and smoke. The kind of easy-drinking shiraz many people are looking for.

Beppi Crosariol