We met Matt Sherlock at his Vancouver home on a sunny weekday afternoon. Matt, who helps run Nichol Vineyard, co-owns Lock & Worth Vineyards, and is also a consultant, spends half his time in Vancouver and half his time in Naramata. His apartment in Vancouver has a great location and a spectacular roof top patio, and his place in Naramata is, well, in Naramata. One can see why he doesn’t mind working from either of his homes.
Matt has worked in the wine industry in one capacity or another for most of his working life. Over the years he has been to New Zealand, Australia, Europe, and the United States and has developed his own winemaking philosophies along the way. He is passionate about bringing Canadian wines up to international standards, and is working hard at both Nichol and Lock & Worth to do so.
New District : How did you get into the wine industry?
Matt: I started in the wine industry managing a bar, then I moved into retail, and then eventually into teaching for the WSET program. I did my first vintage overseas in Marlborough, New Zealand, and then I did vintages in California and the Okanagan before being asked by Ross Hackworth, the owner at Nichol, to join his team at Nichol Vineyard.
How did you meet Ross?
I used to buy a lot of wine from him for my stores and I really liked what he was doing. I really liked his wines, especially in the context of the Okanagan, and we had a good relationship. One of the reasons he asked me to join Nichol was to start a second winery with him – Lock & Worth. I am a partner with Ross at Lock & Worth, and I work for him at Nichol.
How did Nichol get started?
Nichol is the third oldest winery on the Naramata Bench. It was started in 1989 on five acres which were planted on granite bedrock. It was the first time that Syrah was planted in Canada and Syrah’s old world home, or it’s birthplace, was on granite in northern Rhone. Over the last ten years we’ve expanded our vineyard holdings to 19 acres. We’ve done that by propagating out our own vine material and planting on our neighbour’s property, so all the wines come from within 900 metres of the winery. It’s been a great way to expand without having to borrow a whole bunch of capital from the bank. We don’t own the land, but we control the farming. Our vineyards are also rooted so we don’t use graft stock which is very unique for the Okanagan.
What exactly does root stock only mean?
In the early part of the 20th century a louse called phylloxera infested Europe. It eats the root of a plant and kills it slowly. There was no way to stop it; they couldn’t figure it out. People put out $20,000 rewards, they flooded vineyards with urine, they tried everything they could, but it killed all of the world’s vines from French root stock. Plants on American root stock weren’t affected, but basically all of the old world’s grapes are grafted onto root stock to avoid phylloxera. Phylloxera doesn’t travel in sand and Osoyoos is a beach so there is very little chance of it coming to get us.
What does it mean for you?
There’s a producer in Piedmont who has two vineyards: one that’s French root stock and one that’s American (root stock), and the wines are profoundly different. He’s done most of the research in Europe on the difference between the wines. We’re not there yet, but it is neat and something we are interested in exploring. Nichol, for us, is all about tasting Naramata: tasting slightly higher elevation fruit planted on granite.
At Nichol all your bottles say unfined and unfiltered. What does unfined mean?
Fining is when you would add a medium to the wine to remove something in the wine. Some traditional fining agents are bull’s blood and egg whites. Basically you are adding something into the wine and in settles all the way through to the bottom of the tank, and then you remove the wine off whatever it is you added. It could take out tannins or colour, it could help stabilize your proteins, it could take out a haze, and if you had something wrong with your wine, like a bacterial infection or sulphide problem, then you would have to use a fining agent to clean it up. We don’t use them because we don’t need to clean anything up. We do a lot of fining trials so we actually take our wines and put them through many, many different fining agent trials on a really small scale – like a litre or half a litre – and we always come to the conclusion that we like the wine that is unfined better than the wine that is fined. It’s usually a truer wine to the vintage.
Can you tell us more about your hands-off approach?
Winemaking wise we are really trying to push the envelope with hands-off winemaking. Like doing nothing. And we have the opportunity to mess around a little bit more at Lock & Worth because we don’t have a lot of expectations like Nichol does. Our customers (at Nichol) know our Syrah, they know our Pinot Gris and we’re happy with them. We don’t want to change them, but it leaves a little less room for experimentation. Whereas at Lock & Worth we can pretty much do whatever we want. Like Nichol, we use no fining, no filtration, and a very minimal use of sulphur. We have a list of things that we’re not going to do, and it is bigger than the list of things we are going to do. Some winemakers in Europe called it “laissez-faire” winemaking.
By choice, neither Nichol, nor Lock & Worth are part of VQA or the Naramata Bench Winery Association. Both are located at the far end of the Naramata Bench, and Matt suggests starting at Nichol, and working your way back to Penticton. Having tried this method ourselves, we can highly recommend it.