Small Wonders: Sandhill Winery

There is perhaps no winery and no person more deserving of serious accolade than Sandhill and its affable winemaker, Howard Soon. Soon has been making wine since 1980 in the Okanagan, and few can match his experience and understanding of the Okanagan terroir. Even fewer can match the patience he has shown to slowly, continually make better and better wine for nearly three decades, maintaining a passion, commitment and fascination with the region, while remaining largely unrewarded for doing so.

That is, until now. Results in the 2008 CWAs hinted that Sandhill was becoming a serious contender with its fifth-place overall finish. This year, it climbed to the top of the ladder, becoming the Wine Access 2009 Winery of the Year - a distinction earned largely on the strengths of its single vineyard and small lot wines, which reflect Soon's commitment to producing wines whose flavours are directly attributable to the quality of the fruit from which they come.

Very few in the wine business are more humble, friendly and easygoing than Soon. For decades, he has championed B.C. wines, educated wine lovers and budding winemakers and has helped build a solid reputation for Sandhill and Calona Vineyards wines as head winemaker for both brands.

Since the Sandhill brand first launched in 1997, Soon has worked very closely and trustingly with his growers to encourage them to produce authentic, terroir-driven wines. Sandhill was the first major brand to concentrate solely on single-vineyard wines, pioneering this growing category - a move that likely resulted from Soon wondering what flavours each site could produce and attempting to capture them in a bottle. He strives to understand every vineyard and every block within and work with the growers to coax all this mystery into outstanding wine.

When asked why the wines have become so good in the last couple of years, and why they are now good enough to earn Sandhill Winery of the Year, Soon is typically modest. It is only when you get into the small details of what he has done, what he has learnt over the years, that you start to see the reasons for the gradual rise in quality. Soon has made little tweaks to the winemaking, accurate decisions made in a timely manner, slowly convincing the vineyard to produce better fruit and making subtle changes in the cellar.

It's further testament to Soon's skill that he has had to work these changes in fairly rudimentary conditions. While plans are in the works for a new facility to be built on Black Sage Road behind Burrowing Owl Estate Winery, a completion date is still to be decided. Sandhill is currently being made in the oldest winery in B.C., which it shares with Calona Vineyards and other Peller brands.

Soon takes all this in stride, claiming it isn't anything special he does in the winery, other than getting access to the best barrels. He says it's what is done in the vineyard that makes the Sandhill wines great.

As the Okanagan matures as a wine region, the importance of terroir is starting to gain momentum. Soon gives a lot of credit to his growers and trusts them immeasurably. The level of understanding that growers Richard Cleave and Robert Goltz have for the Sandhill vineyards they manage in the Oliver-Osoyoos area is a big contributor to the success of the wine.

Soon tells stories of tasting fruit in the vineyard, walking a few rows, tasting a different clone or fruit from a different aspect or slope and seeing the subtleties that can exist within any vineyard. Cleave and Goltz have learned to manage these nuances of the vineyard, giving a little more water here, a little less there, thinning leaves on this block but not that, slowly taming the vineyard to produce consistently good fruit.

So committed are the folks at Sandhill to understanding their terroir, they hired master of wine Barb Philip to analyze the vineyards and identify the unique characteristics of each site and how they show through in the wine. The well-known sites Phantom Creek, Sandhill Estate, Osprey Ridge and King Family Vineyard have been carefully analyzed, and not coincidentally, tend to appear on the labels of their top-scoring single-vineyard wines. Soon is obviously convinced there are enough subtleties in the vineyards to release single-block wines in the near future, which is the next project Sandhill will be taking on.

Did Howard Soon expect top honours when he chose his wines to enter in this year's competition? No. He says he never even entertained the idea. He was confident the wines were good and left it at that, having already moved on to make those decisions that will determine the outcome of the next vintage. Humble as ever, and deserving as ever, congratulations to Howard Soon and the Sandhill team.