Clos du Soleil

The Free Bacchus Story

Clos du Soleil began on the shortest day of the year. On the winter solstice of 2005, a small group of business people bought a 10-acre orchard in Keremeos. The name means an enclosed vineyard of the sun, and the enclosure is the mountain that stands like a stone wall at the back of the vines. Michael Clark, now the winemaker, general manager and one of the owners, trained in theoretical physics and spent 14 years as an investment manager before retraining at UC Davis.

The Similkameen Valley lies just west of the Okanagan. It is a separate appellation and a far smaller one, and it has none of the lakes that soften winter in the Okanagan. Saturn, the winery’s late-harvest wine, is made from Sauvignon Blanc, a grape better known for crisp, dry whites. Late harvest means what it says. The grapes are left on the vine well past the usual picking, the sugar in them concentrates, and the wine comes out sweet enough for dessert. Saturn is not Icewine, which has to be pressed from grapes frozen on the vine. Saturn 2022 has 85.5 grams of sugar per litre, where the winery’s dry Signature 2021 has 0.12. Sweetness on that scale can turn heavy, and what holds it up is acidity. Anthony Gismondi, tasting it in July 2023, found it “perfectly fresh, even carrying 85.5 g/L residual sugar” and gave it 90 points.

Saturn 2022 comes from a single vineyard. The Whispered Secret Vineyard lies across the valley from the winery’s home vineyards, on a north-facing slope by the river, and has much cooler growing conditions; Clark describes its “laser-like acidity”. The 2022 grapes were picked by hand on 18 and 19 November, on cold mornings when, the winery says, sugars and acids were concentrated in each berry. They were basket-pressed, fermented very slowly in stainless steel and bottled the following May. There were 580 cases, all in half bottles.

The certificate stops at the provincial border. The North Okanagan Organic Association (NOOA) lists Clos du Soleil as certified under BCCOP, British Columbia’s own organic programme, which allows an organic claim only for sale inside the province. It is not a Canada Organic Regime certificate, and the winery is not certified biodynamic, though it says it farms biodynamically.

Clos du Soleil speaks of certified vineyards, never of certified wine, so what counts is where each wine’s grapes grew. Of the wines on the winery’s store, Saturn 2022 is the only one made wholly from a vineyard the winery says was certified before that harvest. Signature and the Estate Reserve reds are not certified bottles. Signature takes grapes from vineyards the winery does not own. Estate Reserve Red, which Clos du Soleil calls the pinnacle of its portfolio, misses by less — Estate Reserve Red 2020 is 91 per cent Estate Vineyard fruit, and the other 9 per cent came from La Côte while that vineyard was still in conversion. The bottle to look for is the sweet one.