Our 2024 vintage will go down as one of the most challenging—yet most innovative—in our winery’s 20-year history. Faced with the crop loss at home, like so many producers in our region, we had to rethink the season. Rather than seeing it as a setback, we chose to seize this rare opportunity to collaborate with respected winegrowing colleagues in two exceptional cool-climate regions. The wines from 2024 reflect not only the quality of the vineyards we worked with but also the camaraderie between our team and the industry peers we leaned on for support in a difficult situation.
Oregon, with its renowned Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris, offered a natural fit for our winemaking style and sparked the idea to work with noble Pinot Gris for the first time. Friends Leigh Bartholomew of Dominio IV and Kate Payne Brown at Vinovate, helped us pinpoint two beautiful vineyard sites in the Willamette Valley: Looney Vineyard in the Ribbon Ridge AVA and Stoneridge Vineyard just at the northern tip of the valley. Our winemaker David Paterson had a chance to not only reunite with former colleagues Kate and Leigh, whom he worked with in 2007 at Archery Summit - but also reunite with the Looney Vineyard, having helped craft the 2007 vintage from this very vineyard site.
While we were thrilled to land the leads on such stunning Oregon fruit, we knew if we were ever given the opportunity to work with our Canadian colleagues out east, we would take it. We were so fortunate to partner with two phenomenal growers in the area for Riesling: Paul Franciosa at Grimsby Hillside in the Niagara Escarpment and Mark Picone’s namesake vineyard, nestled geographically in next door’s Vinemount Ridge. Both sites were of particular interest to us as they are planted to the same Riesling clones we have in the ground here at Tantalus: Weis 21B.
For Chardonnay, Corey Mio of Mio Vineyard easily stepped into the frame as we have long admired the Chardonnays of Beamsville and have a deep appreciation of how Corey is farming his young 12-acre vineyard site.
As for our East Kelowna harvest, we did manage to bring in just under 5 tons of fruit from our 50 acre vineyard (for comparison, in a good year with a decent crop, we would expect to see roughly 100 tons harvested). Assistant winemaker Samantha Ross held down the fort at home, overseeing our acreage pick and processing and ensuring our tanks were ready to receive the out-of-province juice and fruit once it hit the crush pad.
Working on the ground in two diverse regions, so many kilometres apart, was a big logistical challenge for our small team and we are forever thankful to our colleagues in each region who helped us navigate the season. Once we got all the puzzle pieces in place from numerous calls and forecasting, David led our Oregon leg – making a handful of trips before and during harvest to walk the vineyards, meet the growers and eventually oversee the picking and processing.
Fruit for our Rosé and Pinot Gris was pressed in Oregon, packed into 1,050 litre “SpaceKraft” totes and shipped in a temperature-controlled truck overnight to our winery. For our Oregon Pinot Noir, we shipped whole cluster fruit to the winery in our picking bins – as it was more crucial for our team to direct the expression of our Pinot Noir ferments here in the winery.
Out east, viticulturist Scott Woody took the reigns of our Ontario harvest, having worked in the region for over a decade, his local intel made for smooth in-roads in finding beautiful fruit and working out harvest logistics. All Ontario fruit was pressed by winemaker Casey Hogan at Southbrook Winery, and likewise with our Oregon leg, juice travelled by “SpaceKraft” totes across the country, this time in just under two days.
When everything was safely in the building we got to work on getting to know these new parcels of juice and fruit. This was where a lot of the fun began for us as our winemaking team explored different expressions of the varieties we love so much, while staying true to our style and winemaking philosophies. The resulting wines are very much of place – clear expressions of Ontario and Oregon, but through our Tantalus lens.
Labels for these wines carry continuity of our brand, under a deep blue colour profile for our mask labels, and clearly indicate not only the provincial or state source, but also the single vineyard names. It was important for us to recognize the growers who stepped in to assist us in bridging this rare seasonal loss.
After a challenging year, we’re feeling very hopeful as our vineyard continues its recovery. The resilience of our vines—and our team—has us looking ahead with excitement to the 2025 growing season and the return to crafting BC VQA wines, grown here at our home acreage in the East Kelowna Slopes!
