The first clue that things are done differently at Adora comes in the tasting room. A tasting is offered at
a modest charge that covers the cost of the elegant wineglass. The view here is that good wine deserves good
stemware, not dollar-store wineglasses. "There is nothing worse than a dinky little glass that you
can't get your nose into or swirl the wine in. " declares Reid Jenkins, one of Adora's three partners.
He feels so strongly that Adora wines deserve good stemware that he encourages each visitor to leave with the
glass they have paid for.
Adora marches to its own drummer in many ways. Its signature wines, Decorus and Maximus, not only have Latin names but bear vintage dates in Roman numerals, (The back label translates the date.) Every wine is a blend: there are, for example, eight different white grapes in both Decorus and the 2000 vintage of a white called Elements No 8. Even the single variety wines are assembled from grapes purchased from about 15 different vineyards throughout the Okanagan and Similkameen. The grapes are vinified separately and kept in small tanks, sometimes for several years, before blending. While other wineries release wines as early as eight months after harvest, Adora ages its wines anywhere from 2 to 4 years before selling them. "In everything we've done, it doesn't matter what the industry thinks the standard is," Jenkins says. "If we don't agree with it, we will do it another way. We like to buck the trend." Adora, however, is not hiding behind a contrary attitude to camouflage uncertain quality. The wines here are bold and complex.
Jenkins, who was born in New Westminster in 1970, became interested in the Okanagan in the mid-1990s when a
Vancouver company he then owned created Web sites for Sumac Ridge and Hawthorne Mountain Vineyards.
He developed a friendship with Eric von Krosigk, who was the Hawthorne Mountain winemaker at the time. The
Adora project was launched in 1999 by Jenkins, and another of his friends, Vancouver car rental magnate
Kevin Golka. Together, they enlisted von Krosigk as Adora's winemaking partner.
"When I sat down with Eric and Kevin, my first intentions were to concentrate strictly on sparkling wines in the traditional Champagne method," Jenkins says. By coincidence, he had hit upon von Krosigk's great passion. "Bubbly is really about life," the winemaker enthuses. " It is about subtleties. It's all about elegance and about whispers. You get a kiss of that and a hint of this but you never get overpowered by anything. It is one of those wines that always tastes like more. Try eating just one peanut - or having only one glass of bubble!"
Born in Vernon in 1962, von Krosigk learned winemaking at Geisenheim. Germany's top wine school. While he was in Europe, he also apprenticed with a German producer of sparkling wine. Back in the Okanagan, he was involved in several sparkling wine research projects and became the first winemaker at Summerhill, a winery that specializes in bubbles. In his subsequent career as a consultant, he has made sparkling wine for nearly everyone of his clients. Adora is no different: the winery has five different sparkling wines. Accounting for 20 percent of its total wine production, which averages about 4000 cases a year. Jenkins retreated from the original plan of making only bubble after he discovered just how long money would be tied up in aging wine before the business generated a return.
Practical businessman, Jenkins and Golka plunked the winery on highly visible site beside Hwy 97, near Summerland just where the highway sweeps around a slow speed bend. The flat-lying 2.4 hectare (six acre) vineyard, formerly an orchard, is planted to Chardonnay, Pinot Meunier, Syrah, Merlot and Pinot Noir. The winery itself is a metal clad building as plain as a mining company's heavy equipment warehouse. Portions of the deceptively large interior have been leased to other wineries for barrel and tank storage. The large tasting room is in the front corner.
"This is a very simple building but it is functional," von Krosigk says. "This is
phase one of three phases. The next one is for a proper barrel cellar and Champagne room. And then there will
be another building which, long term, will have facilities
for a bistro. Our initial focus is putting all our money into production."
He wants to make intense wines, blended to put "the spice points in" and matured slowly. The winery opened in 2003 primarily with white wines-Chardonnay, Pinot Gris, Riesling, Gewurztraminer, Pinot Blanc - and a Merlot from the 2000 and 2002 vintages. "We are not spitting wines out on a 12 month cycle," Jenkins says. White wines are released in their second year, red in their third or fourth year. "We want the wines to mature and age themselves," von Krosigk explains. "There is quite a difference in the character of a wine if you let time do the work for you, rather than fining it to death so that it is ready six months after harvest."
As a consultant, von Krosigk works for as many as 10 wineries in any given vintage. His mandate at Adora is distinctively different. "There are a lot of styles that I can do here that I can't do elsewhere," he says. The Adora Pinot Blanc, for example, is not the fresh, lemony style demanded by most wineries. "This one is a big, bombastic, really ripe Pinot Blanc with 14 per cent alcohol, " he says. "I went for a very different style. It is not what you would say is typical, but I did not want to be typical. The object here with a lot of wines is to take them where I have always wanted to go, but the normal commercial demands of a given brand make that very difficult."
Cited from:
"The Wineries of British Columbia" Pp. 13-15
By: John Schreiner
Whitecap Books 2004
351 Lynn Avenue
North Vancouver, B.C.
V7J 2C4
www.whitecap.ca