Had a Glass: Top 100 Wines for 2006 Under $20

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

Perhaps it’s best to think of this slim volume as an annotated,
time-limited shopping list for consumers in British Columbia and
Alberta, busy people whose lives are too full of immediate and pressing
concerns to linger among the shelves, fondling the vinous goods, trying
to remember what they read somewhere about this wine or that winery. For
such consumers, Hodgson and Nevison have reduced the risks (and the
prospect of adventure along a personal wine route) by sampling 562
bottles and rejecting 462.

By and large, they deliver value for money. The wines they recommend
are good to drink right away and value-priced. Most of them are pushy
and fruit-forward, made from varietals whose juice is neither overly
tart or astringent, when sourced from the right location or
appropriately manipulated by market-savvy winemakers.

The annotations often offer advice of great value. While the authors
are masters of smart talk, they really don’t walk the snarky walk.
Muscadet, even “sur lie” is no gutsy gurgle, yet it has its place.
“Wine is about occasion. A wine might taste like crap when you’re at
some lousy party eating stale soda crackers and listening to a freak
show talk about his ailing komodo dragon. Then the same wine might make
you kneel and praise Bacchus when you taste it on a deliciously lazy
Saturday afternoon while a Coltrane record spins in the background.
Muscadet has time and place, and time and place have Muscadet.” They
scoff at the practice of cellaring wine, but make shrewd suggestions
about wines for cellaring. They offer advice about matching wine with
food, and they match each wine with one or more icons indicating what
(or who) it is good for (romance, broiled catfish). A few of the wines
come with geek icons attached, indicating that they exhibit
characteristics not immediately appreciated by the common palate, but
worth sampling for ... well ... for their educative value.