Our second stop of the day took us further east onto the Twenty Mile Bench. Featherstone Estates, like Fielding and Flat Rock, is family owned and operated. I'm rather impressed with the business savvy of the 3 wineries for taking the initiative to work together on this tour, and for recognizing that growing their shared market is a better strategy than fighting for market share. Some wineries feel like you're visiting a boutique that happens to be surrounded by a vineyard. Featherstone is quite the opposite - a vineyard that happens to house a boutique. In fact, I'm tempted to call it a grape-farm with its farmhouse for a store, barn to house the casks, and very own ducks for its very own pond. (They even use local sheep and a trained hawk to help maintain their vineyards, but I'm saving that for another visit and another blog post.)
The first wine we were offered at the tasting bar was a rose: 50% cab franc and 50% gamay. The server quite rightly described the nose as strawberry-rhubarb which continued throughout the taste, although on the tongue the strawberry was more dominant. Unlike many pink wines, this was not a candied strawberry flavour; it had the pungency of strawberries that are one day too ripe, making it taste more like 'real wine'. Chris noticed a hint of cherry as well. The server also told us to expect perfect acidity, but we disagreed, remembering the tingly rose we'd tried at Pondview in February. Then in the next room we had our wine and crostini pair. This crostini was topped with chevre noir cheese and Killer Condiments sweet pepper relish which made a FANTASTIC pair with the 2010 cabernet franc. The wine itself had a scent of leather and red pepper and we were both very pleasantly surprised by its fullness and consistency - much better than the only other 2010 cab franc we've tried from Ravine Vineyards. We wanted to buy a bottle, but since our wine storage is currently full, we'll wait until we return in the summer to see the sheep at work.
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