John Szabo – 2026 Nationals – Other Single Red Varieties

It was wonderful to see John Szabo MS had a lot of lovely things to say about Moon Curser, and our Carménère especially, in his Category Overview of the Other Single Red Varieties category at the 2026 WineAlign National Wine Awards of Canada.

“The story in 2026 is once again anchored in the South Okanagan’s heat. Two of the four golds went to carménère—Moon Curser’s 2022 bottling and Phantom Creek’s 2022 Becker Vineyard version, the latter a serious $113.85 statement wine…”

“Moon Curser Vineyards, the Osoyoos winery that built its reputation on unconventional plantings and once won Best Performing Small Winery honours for exactly this kind of daring, again proved the category’s most reliable performer with three medals.”

“There’s no tidy hectare figure to cite for a category defined by fragmentation—individual BC plantings of carménère, tempranillo, touriga nacional and barbera each cover only a handful of hectares—but that’s rather the point. This is Canadian wine’s laboratory, where a producer’s willingness to gamble on a grape nobody else grows occasionally pays off spectacularly, as Phantom Creek and Moon Curser proved again this year.”

Read John Sazbo’s Other Single Varieties category overview from National Wine Awards 2026.