Bryan working the harvest at Freedom Run Winery By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Correspondent This year, only a handful of growers and wineries were expecting anything close to a full crop from their young vines here in the Niagara Escarpment. Unfortunately, Mother Nature wasn’t kind to many of them. With at least three hailstorms, relentless humidity and warm, soggy conditions, this was not the season to have your sprayer break down. Those that survived hail damage had to spray often to battle mildew and the not-so-noble sour rot. Ripening was slightly delayed with most varieties, but there’s one silver lining: if…
Posts Tagged“niagara”
Arrowhead Spring Vineyards Joins the Trail
By Niagara Escarpment Correspondent Bryan Calandrelli The Niagara Escarpment AVA added another winery this weekend as Arrowhead Spring Vineyards opened it doors to hundreds of chocolate-eating, wine-drinking visitors during the "Be Mine with Wine" trail event. The Niagara Escarpment itself provides a spectacular backdrop for vineyards in this area which is quickly making Cambria, NY a wine destination thanks to the six wineries located within a few miles of one another. Temperatures in the single digits and wind chills flirting with minus twenty below didn’t stop the hordes of tasters, myself included, from checking out the view from the newest…
The Sweet Hereafter
By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Escarpment Correspondent One of the coolest parts about living in an area with a burgeoning wine region has to be the fact that you get to literally watch history unfold. Of course, some history takes place outside in the kind of cold that burns your lungs and freezes your eyeballs, but when I regain feeling in my fingers I’ll be able to look back on January 3 of this still-new year as the date that marks the first local harvest of ice wine grapes at not one but two local wineries. When temperatures dropped into the…
Duncan Ross Interview at AppellationAmerica.com
So what have you heard about the wines coming out of the Niagara Escarpment? Isn’t it way too cold up there to grow grapes? Actually no and I didn’t know much about the region either until I really started to research the region as I prepared for my interview with Duncan Ross, founder of and winemaker for Arrowhead Spring Vineyard. It turns out that the Escarpment itself–the geological feature, not the region–is the very reason why they can ripen grapes fully so close to the Canadian border. In fact, it’s the second warmest region in New York state. Long Island…