Michael Bariter grew up in the Okanagan Valley
where he likes to say "we know it, we love it, we are a product of it
and we feel responsible for it". His wines are an expression of the valley, bright
fresh, pristine and alive. His vineyards bask in a rare combination of growing
conditions some 50 degrees north of the equator.
It's a relatively high altitude desert climate featuring hot days and cool
nights, low humidity, tolerable winters and
globally young soils laying over glacial till.
Bartier believes that soils are the deciding difference between a good wine
and an excellent wine. We asked him for the back story on South
Okanagan soils and what it means to be a steward of
this land in 2020. Where i'm sitting right now you know
here between Oliver and Osoyoos on the
on the Black Sage Gravel Terrace if you want to call it that
there used to be hundreds maybe thousands of meters of ice
covering where we are right now during the last ice age. That ice retreated
and but while that ice sheet was here it was a conveyor belt it was bringing
rocky material down from northern and central British Columbia and depositing
it in the area, and and now, after that ice sheet
was removed, all of that rocky material was
was deposited just north of us, great big ice dam formed in a
narrow restriction uh in the Okanagan Valley just north of us.
That ice dam burst and created this cataclysmic
flood and deposited all this rocky material
right where we are right now uh these rocks that we are farming
right now and um and this has this has a profound effect, these rocks
this this very complex mix of rocks minerals
on our wine. There are two unique um you know geological um
forms on the east side of the Okanagan Valley the gravel terrace that we're
sitting on right now really coarse soils in contrast to the
to the fine sands that are across Black Sage road from us.
It's a very easy uh landmark where they wanted to build Black Sage road as far
east as possible so they built it as far as possible um
on on the gravel and as soon as they got to the sand they
you know they wouldn't build it over there and because it was just difficult
to build out there. These coarse soils they're difficult to
farm uh it's it's very physically demanding
to work in this vineyard um however
you know the reward is that uh is is the character and the structure of
wines that you get from such well-drained
soils and not just and it's not just the the
texture of the soils but it's actually the constituent
uh materials that make up that those subsoils
it's an incredibly complex mix of different rocks different minerals
and and that ends up well it ends up in the wine glass.
The notion of smelling tasting or feeling a stony mineral aspect in wine
is very controversial never one to shy away from cerebral topics
Bartier suggests it may only be a matter of time before the science
follows what's already happening in the glass. You can have
two wines you know that come from the same genetic material the same vines
that are grown you know a few meters apart but they're in different
geographical or geological formations. They have the same weather
they have the same farming everything is the same what's different
is the geology you know the the substrates the materials that they're
grown in and those wines taste completely
different. What i'm saying is that groundwater goes through
the rocks it picks up minerals uh you know
and it finds its way into the water. And that water
delivers these minerals to the grapevines
and it goes up through the roots, trunk the shoots
and into the fruit. The plant physiologists you know do get their
knickers in a twist so when they hear that type of thing
because they say no science has not proven that
however I think that it's I, I believe as a layperson I believe that science
has failed to prove what is absolutely obvious because there is nowhere else
where that flavour is coming from it's not coming from the air it's not coming
from the sun it's not coming from the farming
it has to come from the different soil types. I've known this vineyard for
a long time, it was planted in 1999 and in 2002 I bought
the first crop from this vineyard from the owners at the time
and it was very good fruit the wines were fantastic. I was a winemaker at
another winery at the time I ended up um signing this this vineyard
to a long-term contract with that winery and eventually I you know I left that
position to go work at another winery but I knew
I knew the expiry date of that contract about the same time as the expiry date I
was knocking on the door. And of course we purchased the vineyard
and very happy that we did. And I didn't know then about the
importance of the minerals of the the rocky gravelly coarse
soils and that was my first lesson on that that was my first profound lesson
on that.