New York Cork Report

Carmelo's Restaurant Introduces "Butcher's Supper"

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Editor

Foodies who pride themselves on eating local have found Carmelo’s Restaurant in Lewiston, NY as a destination for some of the best “farm-to-table” cuisine in the region. Never before has that term been more literal than with the restaurant’s “Butcher’s Supper.”

Chef Carmelo Raimondi and sous chef Bruce Wieszala have created a three-course feast featuring a suckling pig from T Meadow Farm in Lockport, NY as the main attraction.

“We’re breaking new ground here,” says Raimondi.

And he’s doing it with style.

When I was lucky enough to share in the first of such dinners, our main course was met with cheers and applause by the other diners as the chefs carried the whole roasted pig through the restaurant. By the time they set it down the rest of the staff had gathered around with other patrons taking pictures and admiring the sight.

Raimondi has helped establish T Meadow Farm as the go-to for locally raised meats and while you may see pork chops on most of their menus, Raimondi is connecting the customer with the farm like never before. He sees it as turning back the clock on how people appreciate food.

“It reminds me of traveling through Italy with my family when I was a kid,” says Raimondi. “A feast like this brings people together and brings us back to a time when we knew where our food came from.”

Dinner started with a locally cured charcuterie plate adorned with delicate slices of prosciutto, pancetta, coppa, lardo, bresaola vitello, paté and rabbit rilletes.

Alongside the suckling pig was a roasted beet salad with hazelnut, tarragon, grapefruit and dried balaton cherries, a dish of farro as well as hard-cider-braised savoy cabbage. For dessert it was Carmelo’s signature chocolate bar – a flourless chocolate cake with torched homemade marshmallows.

Raimondi, who rarely finds himself in the front of the house, actually carved the pig himself at our table – making for one of the most memorable meals I’ve ever had. For Raimondi the experience was just as enjoyable.

“I felt extremely proud and satisfied to come full circle from my days in Sicily as a child and now as an adult, enabling that intimate connection between the farm and table with a local humanely raised whole pig,” says the chef.

Carmelo’s Restaurant is now accepting reservations that are required at least one week in advance for these dinners. The cost is $55 per person, excluding beverages, service & tax, and requires a minimum of six and a maximum of eight guests. Reservations can be made by calling 716-754-2311.

Video: Leonard Oakes Estate Winery 2011 Icewine Harvest

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Region Editor

This short film is a combination of harvest images I shot in January and a recent interview with Leonard Oakes Estate Winery winemaker Jonathan Oakes about the progress of this 2011 Icewine of Vidal Blanc.

4 a.m. is the Right Time for Ice Wine

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Region Editor

The landscape along the Lake Ontario shoreline-hugging roadway that stretches eastward to Orleans County – Route 18 – pretty much becomes desolate once you pass Olcott. And it only seems more desolate at four in the morning on the coldest day of the winter. Lyndonville’s distance from the center of the Niagara Wine Trail keeps me from making this journey as often as I’d like to, but on this morning there was no hesitation – it was Leonard Oakes Estate Winery’s annual ice wine harvest.

As I made my way through an apple orchard to the first few rows of grapevines in the dark of night, there wasn’t much that would indicate that this was one of the most important days of the year for winemaker Jonathan Oakes, who had been waiting for this day since bud break.

“I don’t feel relaxed until these grapes are off and we’re in with a long enough window to press it out and work with it,” said Oakes.

It was only after hearing the low rumbling tractor noise and following the faint glimmer of headlights at the opposite end of the pitch-black vineyard that I found the winemaker surrounded by a few winery staff and an army of volunteers.

“Can you see the look of relief in my face?” asked Oakes.

While many wineries have already celebrated the end of harvest with toasts and parties, a few Niagara region wineries don’t consider the season to be over until their vats are full of ultra-sweet vidal blanc juice.

With this winter’s unusually mild temperatures, the thought of a normal ice wine harvest seemed like wishful thinking. Yet Oakes reassured me that the weather window we were in was perfect, even going as far as to state that this was the easiest winter harvest for the winery since they started. The lack of snow accumulation in the vineyard made getting the tractors, equipment and people in easier and the huge amount of support they received from volunteers enabled them to get the grapes off the vine in record time.

“During the last couple of harvests, the idea of ice wine was new to our area and it was difficult to recruit people that would be willing to get out there and help,” said Oakes. This year things were different. “All the recent accolades and buzz about our ice wine has really helped to secure people that want to come out and participate,” he said.

It’s this excitement and interest, combined with the fact that the Niagara region has already proven it can consistently produce some of the world’s best ice wine, that leads Oakes to believe that the industry has a strong future in his backyard. 

“I look at the amount of plantable acres we have left, with a grape variety like vidal that can grow in a little more severe conditions, and I think there’s just unlimited potential in our area,” said Oakes.

Even in mild winters like this one. Mother Nature ends up delivering what local winemakers need. And while Niagara is certainly not the only region to produce this style of wine, it does benefit from the success of Ontario’s ice wine industry. Niagara USA needs only to look at their example across the river on how to distinguish itself from the rest.

“It’s going to rely heavily on who jumps out and makes a distinct claim as to what is what our region can be known for,” said Oakes.

Regional branding aside, it’s in the post-harvest moment where I’m standing around with the rest of the crew warming up appropriately enough with a glass of Canadian whisky celebrating an end to a frigid end of the season harvest where I get a feeling of how special ice wine is to have gotten so many people to brave the elements just to take part in its production.

As daylight broke leaving Lyndonville, my journey back home was not as isolated as the trip there. I noticed a few carloads of vineyard workers following me back to Burt, NY where Schulze Vineyards & Winery had just begun their own harvest.

Vineyard Visuals: Leonard Oakes Estate 2012 Icewine Harvest

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Region Editor

Jonathan Oakes and his crew were in the vineyard early this morning collecting frozen vidal blanc grapes for Leonard Oakes Estate Winery's 2012 Icewine of Vidal Blanc.

With a call time of 4 a.m. the crew got the last grapes into bins by 7 a.m. and have already begun pressing.

American Wine Society National Conference Recon

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Region Editor

Last Saturday I did something that I’d never had the chance to do before: I led an all-Niagara (USA) wine tasting for a national audience as Rochester played host to the American Wine Society’s National Conference.

Of course, anyone with foresight and the ability to plan their lives accordingly may have actually taken advantage of the perks of being a presenter at a conference like this by pre-registering for other seminars, booking a hotel room to fully let loose and confirming whether they wanted beef, fish or the vegetarian entree at the banquet. But I did none of these.

So I’m a procrastinator who only experienced one-third of the event. But even with this limited of exposure to the society and its members, I still came away with plenty of thoughts and observations.

New York’s Presence at the Conference

The only seminar I attended due to my aforementioned lack of planning was Jim Trezise’s “New York Gold – World Class, Next Door” and I was excited to see what would represent the state as a whole. The first wine – a wine that took a double gold at the NY Food & Wine Classic – was Bellhurst’s Sparkling and it showed some reductive H2S aromas on the nose and finish. Knowing that the wines selected for this tasting were based on past gold medal awards I suppose this could have been due to some bottle variation.

Luckily, wines like Tierce’s 2008 Riesling, Corey Creek’s 2010 Gewurtztraminer, Ventosa Vineyard’s 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon and Fulkerson’s 2009 Lemberger all impressed. During the seminar there were a few specific winemaking questions, such as what grapes went into the sparkler, but unfortunately Jim wasn’t prepared for anything too geeky.

Since the AWS prides itself on scoring sheets, wine education and details I would have thought the NYWGF would know its audience and be well-prepared to present what was billed as NY’s winning-est wines.

I did find it odd that Jim’s NY Gold Seminar included seven wines from the Finger Lakes while only including one from Niagara, one from Long Island and none from the Hudson Valley. You could make the argument that this was simply because the conference was in Rochester, a short drive from the Finger Lakes, but I don’t think that should have been the point of an all-New York seminar. Besides, Rochester is actually smack in the middle of the Finger Lakes and Niagara regions.

I’m also not sure what level of interest other New York regions had in the conference or if this event was simply off their radars. I owe my awareness and participation in the conference to longtime AWS member and owner of Arrowhead Spring, Duncan Ross.

My Presentation

At the beginning of my session a quick show of hands revealed that a good chunk of attendees thought they were getting a Niagara, Ontario-focused presentation. I gave an insincere apology and assured them that they wouldn’t be let down by the wines they were about to taste from across the river.

Since an opportunity like this is few and far between, I had to go big. The whites I chose were Arrowhead Spring’s Reserve 2009 Chardonnay, Schulze’s Semi Dry Vidal 2010 and Leonard Oakes’s 2008 Icewine. Eveningside Vineyards’ 2009 Cabernet Franc, Freedom Run’s 2010 Reserve Pinot Noir, Arrowhead Spring’s 2008 Syrah and the as-yet-unnamed experiment that is Freedom Run’s 2010 Appassimento of Cabernet Franc made up the red flight.

Instead of giving them a list to accompany each flight, I let tasters form opinions, make some assumptions and guess the grape before making the big reveal, something I thought would make the tasting more interactive. How would they react to one of the most sexy Vidal Blancs I’ve ever tasted without knowing it’s a hybrid? Would they pick out a Niagara Cabernet Franc from a cool year that lacks the overt bell pepper aroma they associate with it? 

Moreover, would they recognize a pinot noir from a warm vintage that shows cherry fruit with assertive tannins and a voluptuous feel? Would the residual sugar left over in an appassimento style red make them think it was more of a dessert wine than a dry red?

The overall reaction was what I’d hoped it would be. Questions ranged from comparing how grapes do on the lakeshore vs. the escarpment to how much botrytis-infected grapes went into the icewine.

On the AWS

Seeing 550 people from across the country gather in the spirit of tasting wine was a reminder that the AWS has dedicated members and leaders alike. It was obviously no small feat to organize and pull off the three days of competitions, seminars, tours and tastings. 

Having personally attended events like TasteCamp and other, more winemaking-oriented seminars, I couldn’t help but notice some obvious differences between last weekend’s conference and what I’m used to.

The most noticeable difference was simply age. The under-40 crowd seemed largely unrepresented during my albeit-limited exposure to the attending members. While there were some funny moments that brought attention to this – like my “If you’re around next year to taste these” faux pas during my seminar which earned several giggles – anyone who I talked to about the future of the AWS mentioned the need to expose the society to the younger generations.

(Just to clarify, my comment was alluding to next year’s national conference in Portland, OR.)

Something else I noticed – a lack of social media buzz – is most certainly tied to my previous point since I was maybe one of a handful people using Twitter during the seminars.

I was impressed after meeting its leaders, taking questions from its members and sharing in its banquet, which recognized the dedication, service and passion of its volunteers and members. But it’ll be interesting to see how the society adapts to a rapidly evolving wine buying demographic.

Vineyard Visuals: Freedom Run Winery Drying Grapes for Appassimento wines

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Editor

Here are a couple pictures of Larry Manning from Freedom Run Winery as he prepares racks of cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc and merlot grapes that will air dry in the estate's 190-year old barn for their second vintage Appassimento-style wine.

Harvest 2011: Wild Ride for Niagara So Far

Pinot Noir grapes still hanging at Freedom Run Winery in Lockport, NY

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Region Editor

For Jonathan Oakes, winemaker at Leonard Oakes Estate Winery and Schulze Vineyards and Winery, the 2011 growing season can be summed up in one word: wild.

“It’s been one of the wildest rides I’ve seen in a long time,” he said.

Thanks to Mother Nature, of course. It started with a cool and excessively wet late spring followed by an intensely hot and dry July. The good news for Oakes is that all that heat enabled the vines to catch up to where they needed to be mid-way through the season…just about the time for his family’s vineyard to get hit by a hail storm. Luckily, it was early enough in the season -- before sugars were accumulating in the grapes -- so the damage was minimal.

Late September rains forced some growers, including Oakes to bring in the whites all at once to avoid the disease pressure associated with the conditions.

“We got pushed into this tight window where most of the whites were ripe at the same time,” Oakes said.

Arrowhead Spring Vineyards owner Duncan Ross foresees a successful harvest of his chardonnay (currently at 23.5 brix) this week and if things stay dry as forecasted, he is considering pulling merlot in as soon as Sunday.

Randy Biehl, owner of Eveningside Vineyards, started his estate harvest on September 24 by pulling chardonnay. I was one of many volunteers who showed up to pitch in and can vouch for the ripeness and overall health of the fruit we brought in. 

Closer to the Lake Ontario, Schulze Vineyards will begin harvesting their Siegfried Riesling grapes this week, and grower Martin Schulze is pleased with how all of his grapes are looking at this point in the season.

“We’ve still got a ways to go for the reds but the stems are ripe and the grapes have a lot of flavor,” says Schulze.

We can’t discuss the growing season in Niagara without mentioning pinot noir and the progress of the largest plantings -- Leland’s Vineyard and Freedom Run Winery’s -- pretty much tell the story of the challenges and benefits of 2011.

I’ve written about Leland’s Vineyard in the past and once again their challenge this season was not only in working with the weather but still raising the fruiting zone and re-trellising. The varying soil types in this large vineyard haven’t made things easy on owner Leland Mote and manager Don Demaison, as the difference in vigor from one end to the vineyard is obvious.

With some botrytis pressure and the all-too-realistic fear that the upcoming weather would only worsen the situation, the decision to pull pinot on September 20 came a week earlier than anticipated. I personally pulled some fruit for my own wine and was pleased with the flavors and overall health of the grapes. Other local buyers of pinot noir from the vineyard include Eveningside Vineyards, Arrowhead Spring Vineyards and Gust Of Sun Winery.

Down the road, the pinot noir grapes in the vineyards of Freedom Run Winery are still hanging and will be harvested October 5. The somewhat-extreme leaf pulling strategy the winery employs seems to pay off in years like this. Other than some raisining, the pinot grapes along with most of the other varieties are in good shape. Expect sugar levels to be close to the range the winery saw in 2010 ranging from 22.5 to 24 brix.

There seems to be a consensus that this year will be average to above-average in terms of quality for what is currently coming in -- that is whites and pinot noir for now. Other than this last week of wet weather, Niagara had pretty much avoided the other instances of prolonged excessive rains that affected regions further downstate.

But given that we may still have another month to go in the season though any speculation on overall quality would be presumptive.

Leonard Oakes Estate Winery's Double Gold Rush

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Region Editor

The timing of Leonard Oakes Estate Winery’s party celebrating their two double-gold medal winning wines from the annual New York Food & Wine Classic couldn’t have been more appropriate. Two weeks before, their 2008 Vidal Icewine and Steampunk Cider both received this award, with the Icewine even taking home the honor of “Best Dessert Wine” in NYS, but the real story behind the appropriately named “Double Gold Rush” event: it was the first public release of the aforementioned hard cider.

Being a lucky member of the industry and media, I was invited to the early tasting before the general public arrived and as I walked through the door I was greeted with a glass and some info on the wines, a pulled pork slider and a pour of the new cider. Jonathan Oakes was socializing with some growers and I had a chance to compliment him again on the deliciousness in my glass and get some more information about the newest addition to the winery’s tasting menu.

As diverse as the Niagara USA growing region is with vinifera, native, fruit and hybrid wines, Leonard Oakes is the first to make a true cider and their decision to go traditional was made a decade ago with LynOaken Farm’s planting of ten different English Heritage apple varieties.

After years of experimenting with small batches Oakes was convinced he could create a cider with the complexity and funk of the English ciders with the crisp, clean forward fruit flavors he thought the American palate would appreciate.

“We wanted to go away from the syrupy sweet over processed additive heavy ciders and go for a pure reflection of the apple with the structure of the English style combined with the American ideal of cider,” explained Oakes (pictured below left).

The winery’s own description of Steampunk says it all:

"Using a mélange of traditional English bitter sweet (Elllis Bitter, Binet Rouge, Chisel J, Dabinette, Harry Master, Major, Michelin, Madaille, Brown Snout, Sommerset Red Streak, Tremalt ) and new age dessert apples (Fuji and Braeburn), Steampunk CIDER is the geared up infusion of old world style with new world flare."

  From what I’ve tasted, combined with what I’ve seen firsthand from when people taste it, it looks like Oakes has achieved exactly what he set out to. One sip of Steampunk inspires a flurry of words akin to refreshing, crisp, complex, clean, mouthwatering and addictive. The result is a dangerous combination of deliciousness and drinkability.

As the public portion of the event began, a sizable line formed from outside the tasting room through the door past the pork sliders and in front of the winemaker pouring his cider.  Jonathan’s enthusiasm and excitement was contagious and everyone I saw was just happy to shake his hand and congratulate him and the winery’s success.

And judging from an equally long line at the cash register as I was leaving, there’s no doubt that Steampunk cider’s popularity will quickly grow among the cider, wine and beer drinkers who can get their hands on it.

I hesitate to even mention what will happen if just a small percentage of grocery stores that carry LynOaken Farms produce are allowed to sell Leonard Oakes’s ciders. Let’s just say there will be more planting of English heritage apple trees in their future.

Extreme Grape Makeover: Chardonnay Edition

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Region Editor

We all know it. Chardonnay has an image problem. It lost its way by rooting itself all over the world without regard for its culture, forgetting what made it so great in the first place.

It’s been taking acid left and right, tartaric acid that is, and hanging out in some dark places, mostly new oak, for way too long. It is a grape that is in desperate need of a PR boost, an image makeover and a primetime comeback appearance in front of the wine world. One wine region has taken this on with the hopes of boosting its own reputation as a producer of world-class chardonnay.

With the International Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration (IC4), Niagara Ontario has pulled off the unimaginable and unleashed a not-so-new but considerably improved image of chardonnay – and it can only be described as cool.

Fifty six wineries from across the globe, including several from Canada, brought their chardonnays to Niagara Ontario last month for a series of lunches, tastings and celebrations in hopes of raising awareness that chardonnay produced in cooler climates retains a distinctive character that resembles what made chardonnay so great in Burgundy.

The makeover process involved a few gradual steps. First the organizers had to define “cool chardonnay.” They took the political strategist approach by defining “warm climate” chardonnay – their opponent if you will – on the event’s website as being “over-oaked and lifeless.” Ouch!

Next, IC4 organizers laid the groundwork for what regions could be considered cool-climate. Defining a region as such isn’t all that simple, but they described cool by altitude, by latitude, by marine influence and/or by climatic conditions. Most importantly, they needed to convince us, the rank and file drinkers, why we should seek out chardonnay grown in these regions. As the IC4 website states, “Chardonnay vines that are grown in cool climates and encouraged to allow a sense of place to shine through can produce a wine that is balanced, refreshing, complex and elegant.” Sold!

With cool chardonnay now redefined, there was only one thing left to do: nail that primetime appearance at the IC4 event. I was lucky enough to make it out for two events – a winemaker luncheon and tasting at Southbrook Vineyards and the Grand Tasting at Tawse Winery – and I feel like a born again chardonnay lover.

So who was cool enough to pour at the Chardonnay world tour, aka the Grand Tasting? Wineries from Ontario, Burgundy, Oregon, British Columbia, New Zealand, Austria, South Africa, Italy, Australia, Chile and New York were all represented. But for me, this is where the message can get a little muddy. Many would question how Australia, Italy or South Africa would be considered a cool climate or question what they have in common with Burgundy or Niagara.

The impression I got after speaking to a few winemakers was that it’s all relative.

Obviously Burgundy doesn’t need a PR makeover like the rest of the chardonnay-growing world, but I did find Burgundian-turned-Oregonian winemaker Gilles de Domingo of Copper Mountain Vineyards to be a good source for explaining his view of cool climate.

“The essentials of cool climate include a relatively late harvest of the chardonnay grapes in late September or even into October following a late bud break during the spring,” he says. Simply put, de Domingo believes a cool climate is one moderated enough to allow a gradual warm-up in the spring, while keeping daytime temperatures low enough during the summer to allow the grapes to hang late into the season.

There were a number of standouts wines at this tasting, including some from regions most people wouldn’t assume were cool climate. Josef Chromey Winery of Tasmania made a good showing, and Ataraxia’s 2009 Chardonnay from the lesser-known South African sub-region of Hemel-en-Aarde Valley were impressive. Pyramid Valley Vineyard from New Zealand poured chardonnays that were zesty and refreshing, and that may have even bordered on grassy, leaving the impression that the Canterbury region’s climate may have even been too cool for chardonnay.

It goes without saying that many of the Niagara Ontario chards were outstanding. The organizers and participating wineries obviously did their homework and poured the best the region has to offer.

My favorites were from Southbrook, Hidden Bench, Pearl Morisette and Tawse. Poured side-by-side with the international wineries, there’s no doubt, to me at least, that Niagara chardonnay can stand with the best of them.

What was the common thread in all these wines? Similarities became transparent in lively acidities, delicate balances, lower alcohols, and fruit profiles resembling citrus and stone fruit as opposed to melon and tropical aromas. There was an obvious lack of over-oaked wines, and not one of my notes included the words buttery or butterscotch, indicating that maloactic fermentations were closely managed.

But should New York now jump on the cool chardonnay bandwagon?

Interestingly enough, Dr. Konstantin Frank was the only New York producer at the event. We are certainly the textbook definition of cool climate and there’s no shortage of chardonnay growing across the state, so there’s nothing stopping New York from making wines like these – and educating the consumer as to why they’re special as well. I think New York can learn from Niagara’s coordinated marketing campaigns and meticulous quality control.

There may even be a few other grapes in the state that ready for an image makeover too. How about merlot on Long Island or Lemberger in the Finger Lakes? Maybe even baco noir in the Hudson Valley is ready for its closeup.

Niagara Wines (and Cider!) to Beat the Summer Heat

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Region Editor

It’s still hot in New York this week -- really hot. We’ll hit 90º in Niagara and luckily for those of us who turn to local alcoholic beverages for relief, there are a few options that stand out among the rest

Eveningside Vineyards 2010 Reserve Chardonnay
Oaked chardonnay, you ask? Why yes, this delicately oaked Niagara chardonnay didn’t undergo maloactic fermentation and has pretty much been my go-to wine this summer. Among the aromas of orange peel and nectarine, hints of pineapple combine with subtle coconut and vanilla notes to resemble a well-made piña colada. Want butter in your chardonnay? You aren’t going to find it here.

Freedom Run Winery 2010 Vin Gris
Freedom Run swung for the fences with this saingée style rosé made from cabernet franc and merlot. Without even a hint of green, this rosé is over the top, with fruit-forward aromas of ripe strawberries and candied cherries. With ripeness levels as high as they were in 2010, this rosé has got some weight and carries it gracefully. The only problem with this wine is that only 37 cases were produced, and there are only a few left.

Schulze Vineyards 2010 Semi-Dry Vidal
To any acid-loving wine snob this wine would already have two strikes against it because of its name. With vidal considered a hybrid and the term “semi-dry” being translated as “white wine with training wheels,” I’d probably prefer to pour this blind for my geekier wine friends. Intense grapefruit, apricot and melon aromas explode out of the glass while its racy acidity and stony minerality leave you wondering why more people can’t make vidal sing like this.

Arrowhead Spring Pinot Noir 2009
That bottle of white not doing it for you? Well if you must open a red during this season’s latest display of global warming, then let it be pinot noir and specifically this Niagara Escarpment-grown specimen. With fruit from the vineyard of soon to be Long Cliff Winery, owner and winemaker Duncan Ross has crafted a fruit-forward pinot that is true to the region while keeping it at a wallet-friendly $17. Aromas of raspberry, cranberry and spice team up with soft tannins and a light body to make for an easy drinking red with which to watch the long summer sunset.

Leonard Oakes Steampunk Cider
What does a winery do when its roots are in apple farming and its young winemaker is as versatile as good sparkling wine? That’s right, make a kick-ass sparkling cider made from at least 12 different apple varieties grown on their farm. The first bottle I sampled of this cider didn’t last more than 15 minutes. It’s that good. What does it taste like? Apples! It’s simply one of the most refreshing alcoholic beverages I’ve ever had and it’s got attitude.

What Niagara USA Needs to Reach Its Potential

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Region Editor

I’ve been able to experience firsthand the rapid expansion and improvement in quality in the last four years in the Niagara region. There is plenty to be optimistic about. Just four short years ago, the region was home to seven wineries of varying styles and quality -- and they had just formed what we know today as the Niagara Wine Trail.

By the end of this summer, the trail will have more than doubled in size to 15 thanks to wineries like Long Cliff and Gust of Sun, which are slated to open their doors before the end of the growing season.

The relative affordability of buying land here, combined with the fact that there’s plenty of great vineyard land still available, has no doubt contributed to this rapid growth.

After last month’s TasteCamp, the obvious lack of big investment couldn’t have been more apparent during Sunday’s time in the U.S. side of Niagara wine country. While this is something the region can’t change overnight, it is certainly not an issue unique to Niagara – and not the only thing holding itback.

So after four years of seeing some things change and many things stay the same, I thought it would be interesting to list what I believe to be the not-so-obvious obstacles this young region faces.

Winemaking Experience

There have been quite a few memorable wines made here and it’s amazing in a positive way to think that only a small portion of them were made by a winemaker with formal training in winemaking. While I’m of the belief that great grapes make great wine, consumers expect quality in every bottle of every vintage – something that is undoubtedly easier with experience and a familiarity with the local conditions terroir.

Now this obviously goes back to the “money thing” but I think it also has to do with the priorities the winery.

Eveningside Vineyards is a great example of a winery with micro-production and a modest budget that finds the resources to pay consulting winemaker Angelo Pavan of Cave Spring Cellars in Ontario. His experienced hand shows in the quality and consistency I’ve tasted in their wines from day one.

I want to make myself clear though, I don't believe formal training or a degree is a must to make great wine. On the job experience and apprenticing goes a long way in this industry.

Marketing Niagara

Let’s pretend for a second there isn’t a native grape called “Niagara” that everyone associates with grape-y, foxy and often off-putting aromas. The word would then be open for sexier associations, like ice wine, chardonnay, pinot noir or cabernet franc. I know it’s not that easy, but the preconceived notion that all of our wine is foxy, grape-y or sweet is a hurdle that the region needs to overcome.

I am well aware that the native grape stigma is not exclusive to the Niagara region. The Finger Lakes has always had these native wines but that region is now a shining example of how to cultivate the grapes that do best, in their case riesling, and market themselves as the premier destination for that grape in the country.

Buses and Limos

It wouldn’t benefit any business owner to complain about the sheer number of visitors that come through their doors, especially in such a young region. But when a certain contingent of customers, and I use that term liberally, simply see your business as a stop on a day-long winery crawl, I think there needs to be careful consideration as to who your real “customers” are.

I’ve come to believe that it’s not the wine you’re wasting when you are pouring for people who don’t care enough to know what’s in their glass. It’s the winery employee’s time that may be the real waste. The personal interaction between pourer and taster cannot be underestimated, especially when the wines benefit from the background of vintage variation, winemaking techniques or any information that lends itself to a customer’s appreciation of the experience.

Too often I’ve seen tasting rooms get instantly inundated with groups of 20, 30 and even 40 – the majority who have been drinking in their buses, are indifferent to what wines they’re trying and are all around disruptive to smaller groups and couples looking to taste in a relaxing atmosphere. I’ve seen wineries increase their tasting fees just to ensure they aren’t losing money on these groups, but that in my opinion negatively affects sales, especially to those who generally buy at least one wine at each winery because they feel obligated.

Hospitality

Like in Field of Dreams, the idea of “If you build it, they will come” is one you can apply to wineries. In Niagara USA, the wineries have been built and the vineyards have been planted, but where do they stay and where do they eat?

Of course, there are plenty of awesome accommodations in Western New York, but not so much in the middle of the wine growing region. At the same time, the trail is now big enough to consider taking two days to explore. While the towns of Lewiston, Youngstown and the cities of Niagara Falls and Buffalo are all close enough to be made home base, there just aren’t enough B&Bs and restaurants in the heart of the trail.

Sure, there are a handful of restaurants and cottages on the lakeshore, but they haven’t made much of an effort to stock local wines or do things to position themselves to benefit from the influx of tourists.

I also feel it’s up to the wineries to make their farm a destination in and of itself, with special tasting events and promotions, live music, art exhibitions and picnics. But it seems like they’re just struggling to keep up with aforementioned buses and limos. That’s preventing them from dedicating staff to anything other than mass tastings.

None of these obstacles are insurmountable, especially in the long term. But producers here need to look to their neighbors to the north and south to come up with some solutions. Niagara is by no means isolated. It sits between two of the largest growing regions on the east coast. Hopefully the knowledge accumulated by those around us will help us evolve, and not just in growing and winemaking, but in marketing, operating and in our ability to take care of our visitors.

Recognizing and Preserving Terroir in Niagara

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Region Editor

Niagara Ontario does not use the term “terroir” lightly. For a relatively new wine region, it has established one of the most detailed appellation and sub-appellation systems in the new world. Any serious discussion of winemaking in the region never fails to mention soil types, slope and proximity to Lake Ontario. And even though every grape in Niagara does have a unique origin, there are some wineries making terroir front and center – while at the same time employing specific methods in the vineyard and cellar to preserve their wines’ provenance.

As it happens, TasteCamp North attendees only had to wait five minutes before the weekend’s first speaker, Paul Bosc, Jr. of Chateau des Charmes, presented us with the map of Niagara’s regions and ten sub-appellations. For growers, owners and winemakers, this guide has become the holy book of terroir in Niagara.

Indeed, virtually every industry personality who spoke at TasteCamp began the discussion with a description and history of local soils, and even though dividing the region into “bench” and “Niagara-on-the-Lake or NOTL” wines is a gross oversimplification at this point, it was a good starting point.  As the weekend went on, though, it became apparent, for example, that the there isn’t much similarity in the bench at St. David’s and the bench in Beamsville given the distance the bench is from the lake at both sites.

If anything, TasteCamp was a great reminder that making direct comparisons of any wines from different sub-appellations is helpful in discovering the diversity of the region, but is a strategy that must be approached with caution. Differences in vine age, clonal selection, vineyard spacing, trellising and cropping all contribute to the flavor and chemistry of the grapes. On top of that, the winemaker’s hand cannot be discounted when discussing the similarities and differences of wines produced from appellation to appellation.

Terroir as the Single Voice of a Vineyard
While there are several wineries featuring vineyard origins on labels locally, no other has based its identity on single vineyards more than Le Clos Jordanne. The winery focuses on chardonnay and pinot noir exclusively, with the goal of expressing the terroir of its four vineyards through these grapes.

Le Clos Jordanne has three tiers of wines, with the first and least expensive being the Village Reserve. Simply put, any grapes that do not make the cut from LCJ vineyards go into this blend. Year to year, this blend is $25 and is all Niagara in style.

The next tier is the winery’s single vineyard bottlings, Le Clos Jordanne, Claystone Terrace, La Petite Vineyard and Talon Ridge Vineyard. These wines are all given native fermentations, with long, cool ferments and similar oak programs, ultimately with the goal of identical vinifications producing four distinctive wines.

The winery’s highest-priced bottling is their Le Grand Clos, which is the very best it has to offer in a given vintage. Ever since LCJ started making the Grand Clos Pinot Noir it’s come from the same block of the same Le Clos Jordanne Vineyard. What’s so special about this one spot?

“It’s actually more silty than the rest of the vineyard,” says winemaker Sebastien Jacquey. In my mind there’s nothing less sexy and less marketable than silt, so it’s ironic that the winery’s flagship luxury wine is from that site.

But that’s the point of the LCJ anyway: to isolate those small areas that produce the most distinctive wines. Unfortunately, though, TasteCamp attendees didn’t get to taste full horizontal flights of pinot or chardonnay. Although the 2008 Claystone Terrace Pinot Noir was enough to satisfy me.

Terroir Through Biodynamics and Wild Fermentations
For a region that sees such cold temperatures in the winter, excessive moisture and humidity during most of the growing season and the ever-growing threat of unpredictable weather, the notion that biodynamic practices can succeed here isn’t one you’d hear from many unless you’re talking to Ann Sperling, winemaker at Southbrook Vineyards, in NOTL.

Sperling, like many who practice biodynamics, is convinced that the proof of its success is in the grapes and how her wines reflect where they are grown.

“Our viticultural practices give us ripe fruit, small berries and thin skins so in the winery we can be very gentle,” Sperling said during an interview I had with her last fall. “We don’t add any nutrients because we don’t need them.”

(The addition of yeast nutrients is a common winemaking practice that feeds the yeasts encouraging a healthy fermentation and reducing issues like volatile aromas, sulphur aromas and stuck ferments.)

Southbrook also has a clean record of using indigenous yeasts and indigenous maloactic bacteria in fermenting its wines. While there’s an obvious correlation between the philosophy of organics, biodiversity and native-yeast fermentation, Sperling thinks it goes well beyond that. She believes that the absence of synthetic fungicides preserves populations of the natural yeasts while not selectively destroying or encouraging the growth what occurs naturally in the vineyard.

Southbrook’s site has flat, features moderately vigorous soils and is far enough from Lake Ontario to warm up quickly in the spring, making it particularly suited to Bordeaux varieties. Crops are kept below two tons per acre and vines are generally not hedged. In the winery, fermentations are kept relatively cool reducing over extraction, and fining, filtration and new oak are kept to a minimum.
 
Friday night’s dinner at Ravine Vineyard featured a few selections from Southbrook including their 2005 Poetica Chardonnay, 2008 Whimsy Cabernet Franc and my favorite, their 2007 Poetica Cabernet Merlot. In my opinion, each of them showed enough restraint with oak and extraction to express the NOTL character.

Terroir By Gravity Flow and Gentle Winemaking
Not only is Niagara blessed with the soils and climate to make distinctive wines, it’s also blessed with people and the resources to make wines that highlight them. Tawse Winery strives for a natural balance in the vineyard and has the ideal facility to produce wines in a way that handles the grapes and wine in the most gentle and effective way.

The idea behind gravity flow wineries is simple: Limit the amount of stress, oxygen and physical manipulation of grapes, musts and wines using a well thought out construction that uses gravity to transfer wines throughout each phase of production.

Tawse’s Paul Pender gets to make wines in what is probably the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a wine production utopia. As esthetically pleasing as the winery is from the outside, to anyone interested in winemaking, what goes on behind the scenes is even more impressive.

From a crane inside the crush pad of the winery, the grapes (for reds) are and juice (for whites) is moved into primary fermentation vats at the highest level of the winery. The red grapes are only destemmed without any intentional maceration, leaving whole berry grapes for a cooler, longer fermentation.

Whites are also given delicate treatment starting at the crush pad. “We average 8-10 hours for pressing our whites…some wineries may only take two hours to press,” noted Pender.

Tawse keeps stainless tanks for the wines to settle out on next level downward. Without using pumps, the wine is simply allowed to flow through hoses down to this level and then ultimately down to one of the two impressive barrel cellars the winery built. The cellar is buried under several feet of earth to naturally maintain a constant temperature.

The cellar itself looks like what you’d see if you are lucky enough to visit the great estates of Bordeaux – until you notice the modern system of hoses and pipes in the ceiling that are used to move wine into the barrels. It’s truly an amazing setup.

All of this talk of winemaking would be a waste of time if the wines weren’t spectacular. The chardonnays poured at TasteCamp were both top notch, showing exactly the differences Pender hoped would come through in the side-by-side of Quarry Road and Robyn’s Block 2009 bottlings. My favorites at the bar were the Pinot Noir Cherry Ave 2008 and the Cabernet Franc Van Byers 2008.

Tawse wines show a tension while young that stand out more than most. While there’s no doubt that their intensive vineyard practices are giving them quality grapes, I think the unobtrusive methods practiced at the winemaking end are producing wines with better structure, purer fruit and less astringency than most, leaving a clearer taste of where they are from.

In the End
There are going to be plenty of assumptions, assertions and proclamations from our weekend in Niagara like cabernet franc does better in NOTL or riesling is better on the bench. Our experience at TasteCamp did not provide us with a complete picture of the region’s diversity in terroir and to be honest, it wasn’t supposed to. We would surely need more than the time we had.

With the sub-appellation system being less than ten years old, the benefits of the categorization are only now starting to show in the wines we tasted. Finding the right soil for the right grape is only the beginning. Then it becomes the right clone, the right spacing, the right trellis, the right cropping, right vinification. It goes on and on.

In the meantime, though, I need to decide which Niagara cabernet franc I want to drink next. Will it be the Lincoln Lakeshore from Tawse, a NOTL selection from Southbrook, a Niagara Escarpment wine from Vineland? Or maybe it’ll be a St. David’s Bench bottle from Chateau des Charmes or the Four Mile Creek from Coyotes Run. In my opinion they’re all pretty darn good.

TasteCamp North Preview: Our Hosts in Niagara USA

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Region Editor

TasteCamp North 2011 is just around the corner, so I thought it would make sense to introduce some of the wineries and people we'll be meeting during the U.S. portion of the programming.

Niagara USA might not have the international cast of winemakers that you’d find in a more developed region -- yet -- but it boasts a diverse group of pioneers who are collectively proving every day that quality wines can be made on the escarpment north to Lake Ontario. 

Duncan Ross of Arrowhead Spring Vineyards: 

Duncan Ross’s winemaking obsession inspired him to build a picturesque wine farm on the slopes of the Niagara Escarpment with his wife, Robin, who manages their seven-acre vineyard. This scenic sloping farm hosts the only significant plantings of syrah and malbec in the region.

Duncan is certainly one of the most outspoken personalities in the region when it comes to his belief that Niagara is one of the best places to grow vinifera in the country. He’s been vocal in the debates that are helping to shape the New York wine industry and he’s a frequent commenter on the New York Cork Report. He is also a passionate believer in the red blend, which can be tasted in his winery’s flagship red Meritage.

Duncan also likes his chardonnay fermented in barrels, which coincidentally may be the first wine that 2011 wine attendees sample after the Grand Tasting on Sunday.

In addition to his barrel-fermented estate grown chardonnay and syrah, chances are guests will get to taste his Bordeaux varieties from the barrel. Robin will also discuss vineyard practices and the farm’s ultimate goal of sustainability.

Kurt Guba of Freedom Run Winery: 

Kurt Guba has one of the most recognizable faces of any member of the Niagara Escarpment wine industry, and that’s not just because he’s in my “Stump the Goob” video series. A stage actor by trade, he’s not shy when discussing the wines he helps craft at Freedom Run.

As a certified sommelier, Kurt’s driving passion is education. When he’s not climbing on barrels or making sure every tasting room guest gets the most out of their experience, he teaches students at Niagara County Community College’s Culinary Program which has a partnership with Freedom Run to serve as a teaching winery.

Kurt will be waxing on his favorite subject as he guides attendees through an extensive tasting of the winery’s three vineyard blocks of pinot noir. In addition to the heartbreak grape, guests will get to taste barrel samples of cabernet franc, merlot and cabernet sauvignon. Attendees will also be the first to sample Freedom Run’s apassimento-style wines currently in barrel.

Jonathan Oakes of Leonard Oakes Estate Winery: 

Jonathan Oakes is one of the busiest winemakers in the region.

As a recent graduate of Niagara Teaching College’s Viticulture and Oenology program, he now applies his cool-climate winemaking skills at both Schulze Vineyards and Leonard Oakes Estate Winery, a family winery that’s a part of LynOaken Farms, a large apple producer in the region.

Even though Jonathan is a relatively young winemaker, he’s now responsible for the huge volume of wine made between the two wineries. From vinifera to hybrid and native grapes, still to sparkling, and late harvest to icewine, he shows his versatility while he consistently produces quality wine across a wide spectrum of styles.

Jonathan will be pouring some 2010 reds, whites, sparkling wines, and icewines that have yet to be bottled from both wineries. His presentation will highlight the terroir of the areas north of the escarpment as well as on the similarities and differences between Niagara USA and Ontario growing regions.

Black Willow Joins the Niagara Wine Trail

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Region Editor

I recently made my first visit to the region's newest winery, Black Willow Winery, in Burt. The tasting room for is housed in a newly renovated barn that sits right on Lake Road (Rt. 18) less than a mile from the southern shore of Lake Ontario.

There isn't an adjacent vineyard yet, but with all the orchards surrounding the property, it has the quaint rural feel that you associate with wine country.

Once inside, I was immediately impressed with the crisp and delicate nature of the whites. With grapes sourced from Cayuga Lake, the chardonnay was lightly oaked, with clean citrus and pear aromas. There were subtle toasty notes, but overall, this lived up to it’s billing as a “lightly oaked” wine.

The Trilogy White picked up right where the Chardonnay left off, with clean flavors of tropical fruit and spice. It's a blend of gewurtztraminer, cayuga and riesling and was soft, subdued and balanced. It too was sourced from Cayuga Lake.

The first red I tried was cabernet franc, and though I was ultimately disappointed from an exaggerated push of fruit (likely from some oxidation), the un-oaked black cherry notes will most likely still appeal to many customers who don’t fuss over volatility. The Trilogy Red had a hint of oxidation, thanks in part to the blend consisting of likely the same cabernet franc with Chancellor and cabernet sauvignon,Yet its aroma of bright cherry fruit was reminiscent of Swedish Fish candy.
 
Just as expected, there were a few native wines on the list and the first was actually pretty restrained. Bare Cat Blush, named after the owner’s love of hairless cats, is a Catawba-based blush that doesn’t venture into “sweet for sweet’s sake” territory. Its aroma is a dead ringer for Pez, and it has just enough grapey flavor to appeal to the native grape lovers.

Black Widow Berry is a blend of concord and blackberry extract. Interestingly enough the tasting room staff encourages you to eat a Junior Mint before tasting it, which goes against any instinct I have but actually works with this 7% RS wine.

But what probably got me most excited was getting to taste the winery’s soon-to-be released meads while owner and winemaker Cynthia Chamberlain showed me the production area. Black Willow’s meads, otherwise known as honey wines, are sourced from local honey and fermented dry. These wines were unlike any I’ve tasted in Niagara.

The Odin Nectar was diluted to 24 brix and fermented dry with aromas that I would normally associate with beer: citrus, pulp and banana. It also reminded me of skin-fermented white-grape wines on the palate.

Chamberlain revealed that this one will be sweetened slightly by adding honey back to the wine before bottling.

Finally, the wine that rocked my palate was an experimental product called Nordic Fire. This mead was made from pepper-infused honey, giving it a pleasant citrus and white pepper nose and red-hot fireball pepper packed flavor on the palate. Chamberlain said that the actual wine should not have as much alcohol as it really brings out the heat but I actually really liked it.

Even though the winery isn’t offering any locally grown wines yet, Chamberlain made clear her intentions of planting vines.

“We’re still determining what we can plant here given that we are so close to the lakeshore, we don’t get the warmth that they get further inland,” she says. “We’d like to plant something different and something we know will ripen.”

No matter what they decide to put in the ground it’s exciting to see a new winery with intentions of making all their wines in house with their own hands, even being as bold to be the first ones to make and sell mead on the trail. As far as location goes, they couldn’t be in a better area. The lakeshore between Wilson and Olcott, NY is beautiful and it’s great to see Black Willow bringing more people out to this area.

Brock Expert's Tasting: Chardonnay as the Canvas for Niagara

 
By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Region Editor

The keynote speech at this year’s Expert’s Tasting of Ontario wines began with a reference to Alsatian winemaker Jean Michel Deiss, whose passion for the blend or assemblage led him to ask this question: “How can we create literature with one phrase, music with one note, or a symphony with a single instrument?”

The speaker, Peter Gamble, industry veteran and winemaker at Ravine Vineyard, then posed the idea that if there were a few grapes in the world that could, like a symphony, bring tears to your eyes by themselves, one would be chardonnay.

While moved by the existential thinking that goes into this philosophy, I’ve never been moved so much as to shed a tear while drinking chardonnay. I did however find myself on board with Gamble’s next reference, this time to a Burgundian winemaker’s philosophy that she “doesn’t make varietals…pinot noir is a blank slate for Burgundy to tell its story.” This Burgundian notion, which most certainly pertains to chardonnay is why Ontario is boldly organizing itself with the purpose of pouring its chardonnay for markets like London and New York City with the intent to reveal what the region has to say.

Driving across the border to Brock University’s Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute in St. Catherines leaves no doubt to its significance in Niagara wine country. The city is surrounded on all sides by sub-appellations densely planted with vinifera vineyards. To the west are the bench wineries of Vineland, Beamsville and Jordan. To the east is Niagara-on-the-Lake, the Niagara River and St. David’s bench. And last Saturday morning in one room on Brock’s campus the industry’s best winemakers, owners, writers and promoters of Ontario wine came together for their annual blind tasting and themed seminar -- with chardonnay being the star.

As talk of chardonnay’s evolution commenced at the podium, volunteers began pouring samples from the day’s first flight, “The Many Faces of Chardonnay.”  The first few wines immediately filled the room with bright tropical aromas that I clearly had mistaken for breakfast. That’s when I realized that not only was I about to learn a lot about winemaking and how this industry works, I was about to drink some great wines too.

While my eyes and brain made the connection to what I smelled, my focus was redirected back to the keynote speaker’s discussion of how chardonnay went from steely, crisp, austere mineral wines of Chablis to mealy, hazelnut laden, intense extracted wines of the Cote de Beaune.

With the help of, largely, California and the New World, chardonnay morphed into the "Chablis" boxed and jug wine generation, where its character and sweetness was more suited to the average American palate. I think the story of chardonnay then evolves into the oak bomb and to the fruit bomb, which went international with the wines of Yellow Tail.

The optimistic view that Gamble then revealed, with which I am in complete agreement, is that the pendulum is swinging back to less new oak, lower alcohol, higher acidity and toward the appreciation of terroir and the complexities it can show. While this could be said about many grapes -- including pinot noir, riesling or sauvignon blanc -- Gamble cited Decanter Magazine as concluding that chardonnay styles generally define the strategy of the global industry. Does that mean that chardonnay trends are to the wine industry what straw polls are to elections? I’ll leave that for another story altogether.
 
With the grape’s overall significance in the wine industry on my mind, I began tasting through the first flight, which started with a Blanc de Blanc from Cave Spring and ended with a chardonnay icewine from Inniskillin. With the goal of showing the versatility of the grape in the region, this flight nailed it. From the butterscotch crème brulee maloactic conquest of the Rosehall Run 2008 Rosehall Vineyard Chardonnay to the more restrained yet toasty wild yeast fermented Hidden Bench 2008, to the tropical fruit cocktail Chateau des Charmes Musqué Clone 2009 and the sauvignon blanc like 2009 Stony Ridge Estate Unoaked Chardonnay, there was a huge spectrum of flavors.

The aging potential was convincing in the second flight as I really dug the graceful feel of the Flat Rock 2005, the pulpy citrus-filled palate of the 2003 Cave Spring Cellars Reserve and the regal demeanor of the oldest in the flight, the 1998 Strewn Vineyard Chardonnay.

The "Class of 2009" flight was superb. Each one had electric acidity and beautiful balance of oak and fruit. Highlights included Henry of Pelham Speck Family Reserve, Niagara College Teaching Winery Dean’s List, and Pondview’s Bella Terra.

The "Class of 2008" was softer yet still balanced with generally fuller palates and more evident oak. Consistency was the impression here but my favorites were the Le Clos Jordanne Le Clos Jordanne Vineyard, Lailey Vineyard Old Vines, Tawse Robyn’s Block and Hidden Bench’s Felseck Vineyard.

I’m not one to be easily impressed with chardonnay, especially when new oak is involved, yet many of these examples were eye opening and jaw dropping in their gracefulness, complexity and overall deliciousness. There’s no wonder why this industry, which appears to be tight and extremely mature, wants to put these wines in front of as many people as it can.

Will people recognize a sense of terroir in Ontario chardonnay? I think they will, whether you perceive it to be in its bright fruit and extremely floral aromas, its generous acidity or in its mineral driven structure. It may not be as evident in the 100% maloactic fermented examples or the new oak-heavy wines but it’s obvious in the lightly oaked and unoaked wines and I don’t just mean in on the Ontario side of the border.

I find the same markers in these chards as I do in their Niagara USA counterparts. The winemaking, especially when oak is involved, blurs the line, which in this case is the border, a little but chardonnay does have something special to say here on both sides of the river.

May 13-15 will be the next opportunity for writers and bloggers to taste through many of these wines as well as the Niagara USA wines at TasteCamp North. Another will be at the International Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration in July, which is open to the public.

TasteCamp 2011: Going International this May 13-15

The Niagara River divides two wine regions as an international boundary between the USA and Canada.

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Region Editor

As you’ve probably heard by now, TasteCamp is going where it’s never gone before: international. With an agenda that reads like a wine industry A-list, organizers Rick Van Sickle, Remy Charest, Suresh Doss and I have put together an all-star lineup of Niagara, Ontario and Niagara, USA wineries and restaurants that are eager to open their doors to this year’s attendees.

TasteCamp kicks off on Friday, May 13 with a Grand Tasting at one of the region’s oldest wineries, Chateau des Charmes. The afternoon will be spent at Hillebrand Estate Winery with winemaker Craig McDonald, followed by a tasting of Stratus, Lailey and Thirty Bench wines.

Icewine will be the main focus later in the day as Inniskillin, Jackson Triggs and Le Clos Jordanne guide us through tastings at the official hotel of TasteCamp North, the White Oaks Resort and Spa.

The first night wraps up with a dinner at Ravine Estate Vineyards, hosted by two of the most interesting and knowledgeable people in the Canadian wine industry, Ann Sperling, winemaker at Southbrook and Sperling Vineyards, and wine consultant and industry veteran, Peter Gamble. The focus will be on Bordeaux varieties, organics and biodynamics in the Niagara region. I can’t stress to attendees what an opportunity it is to have this husband-and-wife team available for our questions at this venue.

Saturday begins with a vineyard walk, tour and tasting at Tawse Estate Winery. Tawse makes a serious lineup of vineyard-driven biodynamic wines, and winemaker Paul Pender will be on hand to demonstrate the differences between their cuvees. The morning doesn’t end until we head over to Vineland Estate Winery for a tour of St. Urban vineyard, one of the oldest in the region. Lunch will follow with a grand tasting of wines from the Bench area.

Saturday afternoon also includes a tour and vineyard walk of Flat Rock Cellars, one of the most progressive in the region. Inside the winery’s picturesque tasting room, Ed Madronich, president of the winery and of the Wine Council of Ontario, will talk Niagara wine with attendees. The day is capped off with a sure-to-be-epic BYOB dinner at the region’s premier farm-to-table restaurant, Treadwell’s, located in Port Dalhousie.

Sunday May 15 begins with a trip back across the border for brunch and a grand tasting of Niagara USA wineries at the region’s most influential farm-to-table restaurant, Carmelo’s, located in historic Lewiston, NY. Area wineries will be showcasing their best as we explore the early success and overall potential of the United States side of the region. The afternoon will be spent on the bench of the escarpment at Arrowhead Spring Vineyards and Freedom Run Winery, with barrel samples and production and vineyard tours.

Niagara is without a doubt one of the most exciting and cutting-edge wine growing regions in the world. Ontario, which is now hitting its stride with a diverse collection of world-class wines, is virtually unknown to most American wine drinkers.

Ice wine may be the only Niagara wine in your store but there are exciting Bordeaux blends, cabernet francs, pinot noirs, sauvignon blancs, chardonnays, rieslings and much more in these tasting rooms. The same geography that created Niagara Falls lays the foundation for a diverse growing region influenced by the Niagara Escarpment itself, the Niagara River and Lake Ontario. It also created a wide range of limestone rich soils, elevations, aspects and microclimates. 

The unique geography doesn’t end at the border. The Niagara, New York area benefits from the same influences. Even though the Ontario industry is some 20 years older, there’s already a common thread in the best wines from this side of the river.

TasteCamp North will bring all of this together in an action packed weekend of events thanks to this year’s organizers and the welcoming spirit of the wineries and restaurants. We’d like to let everyone in on the secret that is the Niagara region, from the wines, to the cuisine, to the geography and the people.

If you’re interested in attending, the official agenda is posted here and the link to the TasteCamp North website can be found here.

The New York Cork Report 2010 Wines of the Year: Niagara Region

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Region Editor

There was really no telling what my fellow NYCR editors were going to think about my Niagara Wines of the Year finalists -- but I did know a couple things going in.

I knew that I was the only wine editor who had tasted most of the wines. I also knew that I had chosen a diverse lineup so I didn’t think my colleagues had any solid expectations of what they were about to drink.

Before focusing on the winners, I want to congratulate all the wineries that were represented in the tasting. Each flight sparked discussion and I got the impression that the overall consistency and quality, especially in the red flight, helped make a case for each of those grapes in the region.

Leonard Oakes Estate Winery claimed the “Best Niagara White” title with their Unoaked Estate Chardonnay 2009. Why did another unoaked Chardonnay from the Niagara region impress the judges? (Remember that Eveningside Vineyards won last year with their 2008 Estate Unoaked Chardonnay.) Simple: it stood out with intense tropical aromas, great balance and something that made us want to keep taking another sip.

After the judging, I met with Leonard Oakes Estate’s winemaker, Jonathan Oakes. In talking to him I got the feeling that the wine we tasted was exactly the wine he intended to make.

“I chose Laffort’s VL1 yeast which tends to release more tropical notes,” he said. “If anything, I was trying to make a departure from typical chardonnay with this one.”

Oakes himself prefers steely, mineral-driven Chablis but isn’t trying to make that style with his estate grapes.

“We don’t have that mineral backbone,” he said.  “I’ve yet to find that here on the loamier sandy soils but maybe as this whole region grows we’ll get more people growing on limestone and we can shoot for that style.”

Freedom Run Winery was a repeat winner of “Best Niagara Red” with a cabernet franc after a pinot noir won last year. The winery’s Estate Cabernet Franc Reserve 2008 was a 75-case, three-barrel bottling which was meant to show how well this grape does on the clay and limestone slopes of the Niagara Escarpment.

Our tasting panel was impressed by its Old World aromas of blackberry, pencil shavings, olive and smoke. In the context of a strong red flight of 2008s, this wine stood out on the palate with smooth, mouth-filling tannins and a fleshy, fruit-driven palate.

Freedom Run regularly uses second- and third-fill barrels, which tend to be more neutral in flavor, yet this reserve bottling was 67% new oak. Explains cellarmaster Kurt Guba: “We had some new Hungarian oak that year and we always have a couple new French oak barrels so we decided to try both.”

According to Guba, the new oak barrels, especially the Hungarian one, were the talk of the winery’s barrel tastings. “As soon as we started pouring samples of the Hungarian barrel people starting asking when they could buy the wine.”

There was some talk of just doing a single barrel bottling, but after extensive blending trials the winery thought better of that and blended two more barrels to the mix, one new French oak barrel and one used French oak barrel.

In my opinion the new oak didn’t impart much more flavor than the used barrels, as its real influence was on the palate. It feels nothing short of luxurious, especially for a cool-climate cabernet franc.

Niagara Restaurant of the Year: Carmelo's Restaurant

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Region Editor

I’d love to say that deciding Niagara’s Restaurant of the Year was a difficult one, involving dozens of meals and a few days of intense deliberation. In reality it was the opposite. Carmelo’s Restaurant in historic Lewiston wins hands down in Niagara Wine Country, USA – and it would be hard not to declare it restaurant of the year in Western New York in general.

The fact is there’s no other restaurant that comes close in matching the effort chef Carmelo Raimondi makes towards sourcing local ingredients and local wines.

The result is an ever-evolving menu that not only highlights the chef’s ability to blend Italian-inspired dishes with the best local produce and meat, it’s a menu that puts a spotlight on the individual farms and wineries he’s partnered with.

The cuisine here has been top notch as long as I can remember but only in the last five years or so has the focus been so dramatically local. Today you will find Niagara wines, both red and white, on the wine list and, more importantly, on his wines by-the-glass chalkboard menu above the bar.

The local wine options are as diverse as the region itself. I’ve seen local syrah, pinot noir, chambourcin, pinot gris, chardonnay, cabernet franc and Meritage blends on the restaurant’s list. The bottle prices are completely reasonable and the servers are helpful in pouring samples upon request.

This past summer the restaurant also added three taps for craft beer, focusing on regional selections. The first tap beer menu I saw included Flying Bison, Sixpoint, and Great Lakes Brewing.

The great local food, wine and beer menus here surely make it an option for restaurant of the year but the service and hospitality of the staff clinch it for me. No matter how busy or how late, the staff is always friendly and accommodating. Need a high chair for the little one? Carmelo’s has them. Want to just come in for a drink and an appetizer? No worries, try the local pork belly.

In the past couple of years, the Niagara region has become increasingly self-aware of its bountiful farmland, burgeoning wine industry and its growing community of locavores. Carmelo’s has worked hard to bring it all together in what is ultimately the region’s most satisfying dining experience.

A Sampling of Arrowhead Spring's 2008 Estate Reds

Duncan Ross, owner and winemaker of Arrowhead Spring Vineyards, pours his new reds.

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Region Editor

Arrowhead Spring Vineyards billed their last tasting event at the winery as a “Release Event Special.” The tasting, which included five new reds grown in the winery’s own vineyard and one pinot noir sourced from Demaison Vineyard just down the road, wasn’t hyped as their first big estate-grown-red release, but that’s exactly what it was in my view.

Since many wineries are still buying grapes outside the county here, any time a winery releases the first wines made from their own vineyard it’s a pretty big deal.

Arrowhead’s flagship reds are their Meritage and Meritage Reserve, and in 2007 the winery sourced grapes for these from the Finger Lakes. Their 2008’s are exclusively from their vineyard and each one raises the bar from the previous vintage.

With both just recently blended from barrels after 23 months in American and French oak, they are currently showing quite a bit of oak on the nose with subtle cherry and plum notes. The 2008 Estate Meritage Reserve ($19.95) seems to show more fruit on the nose while feeling richer and smoother on the palate.

The 2009 Pinot Noir ($15.95) should be a big hit, and the price tag doesn’t hurt either. Light in body yet firmly structured with fine tannins and vibrant acidity, this is a fine example of Niagara pinot noir from a cool vintage. The sour cherry and raspberry aromas are complemented by an interesting hint of cookie dough and spice.

The 2008 Estate Cabernet Franc ($24.95) is just plain elegant, revealing toasty notes of blackberry, dark cherry and maple. The mouthfeel is subtle and vibrant, evoking the term minerality as much as any local red I’ve tasted. Its 23 months in New York oak barrels is surprising considering how well the oak is integrated without obvious American oak influence.

Cabernet sauvignon is a risky venture in New York but Arrowhead’s 2008 Estate Cabernet Sauvignon ($24.95) makes a case for this variety, even in a less than perfect vintage like 2008. Its juicy red currant and blackberry fruit is balanced well by vanilla and coconut notes while its structure and depth hints that it may be worthy of some cellar aging.

For my friends and I, however, there was obviously one wine that stole the show – and that was the 2008 Estate Malbec ($29.95). Arrowhead Spring is the only local winery growing this grape and none of us knew what to expect. Showing bramble fruit and spice on the nose, the wine was by far the most fruit forward of the flight. It also boasted the most full and fleshy mid-palate of the bunch which didn’t let up during its long harmonious finish.

Bringing Leland’s Vineyard Back to Life

Pinot Noir from Leland's Vineyard being pressed at Arrowhead Spring Vineyards.

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Editor

As I make my way up the steps of Arrowhead Spring Vineyards with Leland Mote, the local vineyard owner compliments me on a recent story I wrote for this site about Warm Lake Estate. But before I have a chance to thank him he adds, “Oh yeah, but you left out a few things.”

When I first met Mote three years ago I knew him as the guy from California who bought prime Escarpment property and made a deal with Warm Lake to plant, manage and buy pinot noir grapes from his vineyard. As it turns out, since the last time I’d seen him, he’d torn up his contract with Warm Lake, hired local grower Don Demaison to tend to his vines and solicited a few wineries to sell his 2010 pinot noir crop.

My plan that day was to sit down with Duncan and Robin Ross of Arrowhead Spring Vineyards -- the pair is buying Mote’s grapes -- grower Demaison and Mote himself to discuss their roles in salvaging what may be the only productive vineyard left over from the failed venture that was Warm Lake Estate.

If there’s anyone that’s willing to go on the record about Warm Lake, it’s Leland Mote. His 14.5 acres of pinot noir vines were basically abandoned during the 2009 growing season and Mote, living in California, says he likely wasn’t getting the full story on the winery’s troubles while his investment went sour.

In what was already a challenging year, what was known as Leland’s Vineyard was in a full-on downward spiral. Disease ran rampant due to a lack of spraying and weeds grew taller than the vines. Duncan Ross visited the site and knew something was seriously wrong.

“We looked at the vineyard that fall and just knew that he [Mike Von Heckler] wasn’t taking care of the vines,” says Ross. “I suggested that Leland talk to Don because Don’s a great grower, close by, and it seemed like a good fit.”

A good fit indeed. In addition to farming in the community for decades, with experience with native grapes and, to a lesser extent, vinifera, Don Demaison had worked with Warm Lake’s 45-acre vineyard in the past. He was familiar with the growing strategy Warm Lake employed and he picked up what Cornell suggests for pinot noir along the way.

That's not to say that caring for the vines was an easy task; Warm Lake’s vineyards are probably the most challenging in the region to keep healthy. Aside from the slope and high clay content that combine to make getting equipment and labor into the site difficult after even moderate precipitation, the vine spacing and trellis height makes maintaining healthy grapes twice as hard.
 
The 10-foot spacing between rows is a huge disadvantage, since the majority of vineyard sprayers are not designed to get that much coverage. The vines were also planted three feet apart with the fruiting wire at a mere 18 inches off the ground. The low fruiting zone makes an already sticky situation even worse with less airflow and more humidity than you’d have up higher.

The idea behind this design was to emulate the vineyards of the Cote d’Or where competition among the vines is high and the low fruiting zone benefits from the warmth of the ground to ripen the grapes. Demaison, for his part, isn’t convinced that this is the right strategy for the Niagara Escarpment, which is warmer and more humid.

When Mote contacted Demaison in September of 2009 he went up to see the condition of Leland’s Vineyard for himself.

“I took one look and thought, this’ll be interesting, I guess I can’t screw it up anymore than it already is,” jokes Demaison.

“The biggest challenge I had was all the disease inoculants from last year,” he adds. Even so, he took on the challenge and immediately made a plan to clean things up by taking off all the rotted disease-prone fruit and taking it far away from the site.

Next up was raising the fruiting wire as high as he could. He wanted to go as high as 30 inches but ultimately had to settle for 24 inches as the trellis was only 4 ft high itself. After cutting back the vines and getting most of them up to the 24” wire he was basically working with 2-year-old vines.

Mote couldn’t be any happier with the work Demaison has done in such a short time.

“Don has done a fantastic job with those vines,” Mote says. “Last year was god awful -- the vines were spindly, they were small. They were so full of disease I couldn’t sell the fruit that was there. Now the vines are bigger and stronger…I don’t think they could be growing any better.”

Ross, who is making wine from Mote’s grapes this year, knew the challenges they faced and is pleased with the quality of grapes he’s received as well.

“It was a challenging situation where we were balancing bringing the vines back to life by growing foliage while trying to keep the fruit healthy and exposed enough to ripen and Don couldn’t have done a better job,” Ross says. “The results are excellent.”

Mote, who has had a rollercoaster ride to get to where he is today with his investment, appreciates the irony that lies in the fact that his goal of selling grapes has actually been made easier with the recent closing of Warm Lake.

“Their demise has actually helped my situation immensely. Otherwise I’d be fighting a larger market with 45 acres worth of pinot growing down the road,” Mote says.

He, like many investors, was sold on the romance and emotion of being a part of something special in the form of the right grape planted on the right site in a region that has everything it needs to be world class. I asked him if he still thinks that he has the perfect site for pinot noir.

“I believe I do. I just know it, it’s there.”

The Obsessions of a Home Winemaker

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Regional Editor

The combination of my three previous years’ experience making wine at home and this year’s epic growing season has created incredibly high expectations for my personal 2010 wines. No longer am I content to just make a wine that is “not bad.” Once again I'm getting pristine fruit from some of the Niagara region's best vineyards and I have no excuse not to make wine just as good if not better than the pros. This season I’m sticking to grapes that I know and love: pinot noir and cabernet franc.

Leading off this year’s lineup is my most fanatical and gratuitous home winemaking effort to date. Inspired by the barrel of pinot noir I made in 2008, I’m having a go at making a barrel of pinot noir with a friend again. The idea for this wine was to source grapes from a vineyard we’ve both worked with on the upper slope of the Escarpment that would ultimately yield small grapes with thick skins.

Our main concern was finding ripe fruit that still had enough acidity to provide the backbone for a Burgundian-style pinot so we could avoid adding tartaric acid in the winery for stability. We also wanted to use the term terroir as much as could so we planned on letting it spontaneously ferment with native or wild yeasts. We also looked to keep the fermentation temperature below 80º F to reduce extraction and prolong the duration of its fermentation.

The fruit came in at 22.2 brix with a 3.25 pH and a TA (total acidity) of 6.75. Since other blocks from the same site came in at 24 brix with lower TA we were actually excited to have those sugar levels. We de-stemmed the grapes without the crushing mechanism installed and pumped them into a large bin. After a three day dry-ice cold soak we let the must warm up naturally.

Having never successfully achieved a spontaneous ferment with anything but apple cider we were quite nervous, but after five days or so it got going and fermented all the way without any problems. I tasted the pressed juice this past weekend and was pretty excited by what it’s showing already.

Being the undeniable cabernet franc junky that I am, there was never any doubt that I was going to make as much as I could fit into my containers. This year I opted to use a 120-quart cooler to ferment my Escarpment-sourced cab franc, for three primary reasons. First I like the idea of its ability to retain the heat generated during fermentation. My goal was to max out at about 28º C to get decent extraction of color and tannin from the skins. Secondly I would rather use a shallow vessel so the cap (skins) has maximum contact with the juice between punchdowns. And finally, I appreciate the fact that I can move a cooler around easily and can use it the other 10 months out of the year when I’m not making wine.

 Since I was so impressed with the wild ferment of my pinot noir I simply added juice from the pinot to the cab franc and warmed the must up by adding two growlers full of hot water into the must. How did I know this was going to do the trick? I didn’t. I just knew that by not adding meta-bisulphate to the must I didn’t have a long window of when it could just sit around and not be actively fermenting before it would start oxidizing or initiating some sort of spoilage.

The growler method worked like a charm (see photo to the right). Within hours, there was biological activity directly around the warm containers. In the bottom half of the photo you can see that the cap is already pushed up as early as the next morning.

To me, making cab franc in the Niagara Region just isn’t exciting unless I can compare Lakeshore grapes with Escarpment grapes, so I was eager to get my hands on some fruit from my neighbors at Schulze Vineyards. I’m familiar with their philosophy of long, cool ferments and thought it would be fun to do just the opposite.

For this project I enlisted my trusty $40, food-grade garbage can as the fermentation vessel. Its drawback is that since it is more cylindrical in shape, there is reduced amount of skins constantly in contact with the juice, making it harder to max out extraction. The benefit of this glorified trash can is that I can wrap a heating blanket around it to bring up the temp to exactly what I need to.

With the goal of reaching 30º C I added some juice from my other cab franc, still going with the wild yeast strain, and set my blanket to low. Once again I saw results within hours.

Since these were machine-harvested grapes there was an added step in this ferment as I was picking out stems and leaves throughout the initial overnight cold soak and first few days of fermentation. Luckily by the time my year-old son decided to crank up the heat to medium without me noticing, most of the greenery was already pulled out when the ferment hit a yeast-killing 34º C (93º F).

According to my hydrometer, the instrument used to measure sugar percentage in must, I lost about 10 brix in one day. Not as originally planned, but it did work towards maximizing extraction. Since that reading I removed the blanket completely and it is now in the mid 60s F (around 18º C) and slowly finishing fermentation.

So, yeah, I’ve been somewhat obsessive this year with two parts of my home winemaking: I’m looking to control fermentation temperatures as much as I can to either maximize or minimize extractions and I want to only use wild yeast ferments when possible. So far I’ve been pretty satisfied with achieving both of these with my 2010 vintage.

Winemaking is a long process, though, and I’ve learned in the past with wine that ultimately resembled tortilla chips in taste that meticulous methods need to be followed through all the way until it’s in the bottle.

2010 Harvest Update: Niagara USA Early Harvest Report

By Bryan Calandrelli, Regional Editor

Niagara Wine Country USA is in the middle of its most significant -- and exciting -- harvest to date. Never before has their been this many vineyards producing vinifera, hybrid and native grapes for wine.

My first glimpse of this year’s crush was at Schulze Vineyards & Winery, where owner Martin Schulze was in the middle of crushing cabernet franc grown by one of the region’s newest vinifera growers, his longtime friend Kimball Paterson. Schulze usually produces a nouveau-style cabernet franc along with his reserve dry, so it should be fascinating to taste his estate-grown lakeshore grapes (which are still hanging) along side this year’s Niagara Escarpment-grown cabernet franc. Schulze also harvested its vidal a few weeks ago for their estate sparkling wine, the only method champenoise wine made in the region.

Freedom Run Winery finished its pinot noir harvest last weekend with brix levels well above typical levels. The estate’s Stonehaus Vineyard pinot noir came in at 24 brix with a pH around 3.30. Talking to Freedom Run’s cellar master (and lover of red Burgundy) Kurt Guba, I got the impression that he is more excited about the triage batch that came in around 22 brix.

Chateau Niagara, one of the newest wineries in the region, brought in its chardonnay, merlot, riesling and pinot noir over the last two weeks. Other than some complaints of raccoon and other animal damage to their crop, owners Jim and Kathy Baker seemed thrilled to get their first estate-grown reds in production.

With what I believe to be the most diverse planting in terms of varieties, Leonard Oakes’s 2010 harvest is in full swing as well.

Although I don’t know the details of what and when, I know winemaker Jonathan Oakes (pictured at right) has been hard at work crushing grapes from his estate vineyard. Lending his experience this year at Schulze Vineyards, Jonathan is one of the busiest guys in the region.

Speaking of busy, Arrowhead Spring has been hard at work crushing some of the 50 tons they expect to process this season. They started with eight tons of Niagara Escarpment pinot noir purchased from Leland’s Vineyard, a vineyard that was originally intended to supplement Warm Lake Estate’s production.

Last weekend Arrowhead pulled their estate chardonnay and they plan on picking their merlot by the end of this week. They will also add Finger Lakes grapes to their production this year with some gewürztraminer, pinot noir, merlot and cabernet franc on the way.

Randy Biehl of Eveningside Vineyards described this growing season as “the vintage of the decade” to me last weekend. He has yet to pull any of his estate-grown chardonnay, cabernet franc or riesling but is eyeing this week for the chardonnay.

It’s great to see so many growers having a successful early season, especially after a challenging 2009 vintage. It’s also a good sign that there’s no shortage of wineries to buy up local grapes from new growers in the region. And ultimately it’s great that demand is so high that Niagara wineries still have to source from Ontario and the Finger Lakes to keep up with their customers thirst for locally made wine.

Living With the Ghost of Warm Lake Estate Vineyard & Winery

Driving past the “Wine Tasting Today” sign on the side of Lower Mountain Road in Cambria, I’m reminded of my first months in the Niagara Region – a feeling that’s compounded when my eyes invariably train toward the “Help Wanted” sign right next to it.

It’s the same sign that I read four years ago that led me to my first job in the wine industry. As I follow the arrows pointing up the hill toward Warm Lake Estate’s tasting room, I don’t remember the road being as potholed and bumpy as it somehow feels today. When the winery itself looms into view, what I’d been hearing is seemingly confirmed: Warm Lake Estate has stopped production.

It’s not so much the desolate parking lot that leads me to the conclusion that operations have ceased so much as the 35 acres of neglected vineyards. I’m reminded of that dystopian Discovery Channel show “Life After People” as I pull up and snap a few photos of overgrown weeds and decaying clusters left on the vine from the previous growing season. The winery, once open seven days a week, is locked up in the middle of a sunny summer day.

A quick phone call to its listed number indicates the line has been disconnected.

When my wife and I moved to the Niagara Region from New York City in 2007, these vineyards looked nothing like they do today. The winery’s outlook was fairly positive. Warm Lake was still selling its 2005 vintage for $40 a bottle while still ultimately making a case for pinot noir on the Niagara Escarpment; the 88-point score from Wine Spectator definitely didn’t hurt its fledgling reputation.

Back then there weren’t a dozen wineries educating their customers on the microclimate created by the escarpment and Lake Ontario, and the benefits of limestone soils or talking about clay versus sand or gravel.

Today, the outlook for Warm Lake doesn't appear as bright. Even after successfully raising enough money to plant the largest continuous planting of pinot noir east of the Rockies, building a winery filled with vats and the best oak barrels you can buy, receiving the highest Wine Spectator score for a pinot noir from New York and after inextricably tying the name “Warm Lake” to the Niagara Escarpment region, it appears as if the rumors of an investor buyout, restructuring and ceasing of production are true.

I personally don’t place all that much importance on why or how it happened so soon -- especially because the Niagara Wine Trail itself is booming. I see it like the details of a bad divorce whereby at the end of the day the result is the same no matter who’s fault it was or what series of events led to it.

Put simply, I think the winery was before its time, and it tried to be too big, too fast and too soon.

How do you market a $40 bottle of wine from an unknown region tens of thousands of times? I’m not sure anyone could have pulled that off in Niagara back in 2007. So when I look at what Mike Von Heckler did with Warm Lake I view his accomplishments in the broader sense: he established an AVA, helped to form the wine trail as it is today, planted an amazing vineyard on prime Escarpment land and placed Niagara wines on the radar of yours truly.

Hell, I was sold on the region enough to move here and buy land.

Before I started contributing to the NYCR, most everyone I’d met in the Finger Lakes and Long Island knew Niagara only as Warm Lake Estate; the two were synonymous and virtually interchangeable. I’d commonly get questions like, “What’s the deal with Warm Lake?” “How’s Mike doing?” “You have that pinot noir winery there, right?”

Indeed, for better or for worse, Niagara’s fate and Warm Lake’s were intertwined.

In my opinion when Warm Lake started having consistency issues with a tough 2006 vintage -- including but not limited to early browning from early pH levels being too high -- retailers and customers that committed to orders and futures orders seemed to start jumping off the bandwagon. Any momentum from previous vintages was lost and the news of dissatisfied customers spread quickly.

Since then, anytime I’ve poured or talked about Niagara pinot noir, people’s expectations have been based on the worst vintages of Warm Lake wines. Snarky comments like “at least its red” were a favorite and I came to realize that marketing pinot noir, even under a different brand name here would be an uphill battle.

Since I still pour in a tasting room down the road I get questions weekly about the winery. These days, the most common revolves around why there’s a wine tasting sign out if they’re closed. But many are interested in what happened and why. I usually just mention that there were a lot of grapes to take care of and a lot of wine to make without a large trained staff.

What’s done is done, though and the region is looking forward, even as the future of Warm Lake remains uncertain. From conversations I’ve had with people close to the situation -– but who also want to remain anonymous –- the winery’s short-term goal is to get the vineyards back in shape and sell grapes as it works toward going back into production under a different name.

I see the distribution of their grapes to a variety of winemakers across the state the best possible scenario for improving the image of pinot noir here.

Driving back down the hill away from the winery you can almost see and feel the hopes and dreams that were lost when these vines stopped being cared for.

I recall my first experiences cleaning barrels and talking about the geology of the escarpment with visitors for the month I spent employed here. I remember thinking that the winery and the region itself is such a cool story that the only thing it needed was people to get the story out and the business side would work itself out.

Having a more realistic view of the industry today I know that it’s just not that simple and I realize that no one winery will define this diverse region. But with the possibility of Warm Lake’s grapes being spread out among wineries and in the hands of careful winemakers, it may ultimately help strengthen the case for Niagara pinot noir once again.

Looking back at the Niagara Wine & Culinary Festival

Two weeks ago the Niagara Wine Trail hosted its second annual Niagara Wine and Culianry Festival at Artpark in Lewiston, NY, welcoming close to 1,100 guests to taste local wine and eat local food during a weekend that saw perfect weather. In its second year, the event drew twice as many people as its first.

I had an insider’s look at this year’s festival as I spent all day Sunday pouring wine and schmoozing with food vendors. Having just participated in the much larger Finger Lakes Wine Festival I was impressed at how coordinated the Niagara event was despite its youth and small size.

Honestly, when I first heard of the event and its tie into the monthly wine trail event schedule I didn’t know what to expect. Even though I’m not a fan of the monthly themed events hosted by the trail, they really do get people in the doors and sell wine -- despite all the commotion that comes with giveaways, costumes and entertainment. Why put all the wineries in one outdoor festival space when you already have a loyal following that packs into cars, trucks and buses to get to the wineries once a month? When that outdoor venue is Artpark, however, it starts to make sense.

Located on the Niagara River (literally) a stone's throw from Canada, Artpark is a cultural gem that has been hosting camps, theater companies, live music and organizations such as the Buffalo Philharmonic for years. Since the wine trail is still in the crawling period of its evolution, it still hasn’t worked its way into the collective subconscious of Western New York, especially the Buffalo area. The festival’s association with Artpark enables it to reach an appreciative, city-centric public that hasn’t quite been convinced to drive out to Niagara County’s rural areas for local wine.

In its first iteration, the festival didn’t exactly get a ton of promotion from the venue. “They didn’t know what to make of us,” explained one winery owner. But after a calm weekend of wine tasting and music, the plans for this year’s event were bigger and better.

Wendy Oakes Wilson of Leonard Oakes Winery saw the difference. “Anytime you have a year's planning under your belt, you’re bound to have a well-planned event,” she said. “Because we purposely kept things small, we are learning on the fly without stressing the organizers out too much.”

The venue handled the music and entertainment and the Niagara Wine Trail was behind the marketing and setup. Promotions included print literature, radio spots and television commercials along with the online promotions. With the press being so widespread it’s Wilson’s view that some wineries from other parts of the state will want to take part next year. They also hope to see more food vendors and more tent real estate to spread it out while keeping everyone under cover just in case the weather doesn’t cooperate.

The wineries appeared to be selling more than enough wine to make it worth participating. The crowd was much more serious and curious than what makes it out to your average winery-hopping wine trail event, and most importantly, it wasn’t the same old event crowd that I recognize once a month in the tasting rooms.

Anytime the wineries can associate themselves with people who support the local arts scene, they are likely to pick up loyal customers with experienced palates and expendable income. Indeed, says Wilson: “Great wine, live music, culinary delights and the beauty of Artpark -- does it get any better than that?”

 

The Finger Lakes Wine Festival Deserves Our Attention

Wine tasting at the Schulze Vineyards & Winery table.

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Region Editor

The annual Finger Lakes Wine Festival draws tens of thousands of visitors to the region, pumping money into the local economy while helping to promote and support one the country’s largest wine industries.

So why don’t we take it seriously?

To come away with a well-rounded story about this year’s Finger Lakes Wine Festival, I should’ve gotten a VIP pass and media credentials. I should’ve had time to go the vintner’s room and participate in the various seminars and tastings. I would’ve needed the whole day to tour the tables to find the best wines of the show. Unfortunately I was again working on the other side of the table and was extremely limited in terms of how I experienced the event.

The fact is I had a blast writing last year’s post, poking fun at the toga party and the how porta-potties can provide metaphorical symbols of what I think of certain wine styles but I realize that there’s much more to the festival than quirky observations.

In the lead up to this year’s festival I thought it needed a fair shake so I intended to show both the good and the bad with video as the medium but with my vantage point being so narrow, it didn’t take long for me to realize that I wasn’t seeing the best of the event. A quick look back at my video clips reveal funny yet unappealing snippets of inappropriate clothing, ice cream being eaten out of tasting glasses and crowded tasting tents.

I was reminded that I was basically reinforcing the opinion that this festival isn’t for fine wine lovers so I’ve temporarily scrapped it. So for now I want to clarify some of the misconceptions I have helped create in the past.

Yes, the festival is crowded and noisy enough that having meaningful conversations with the winery employees is not easy…on Saturday. Luckily Sunday feels like there are only half as many attendees so getting around and having satisfying tasting experiences is absolutely possible and is on par or better than many other events I’ve been to, including Food Network-sponsored wine tastings.

The idea that wineries only bring uninteresting and inexpensive bulk sweet wines is also inaccurate. It seems like more than 75% of the wineries bring some dry wines, including riesling and cabernet franc. This year I tried Tocai Friulano from Ventosa Vineyards, McGregor’s Rkatsiteli-Sereksiya and Cabernet Franc-Lemberger from Anthony Road. I was personally selling a $25 Pinot Noir and McGregor was tasting and selling their $50 Black Russian Red.

The assumption that the serious wine producers don’t participate is also isn’t true. Fox Run, Dr. Konstantin Frank, Chateau Lafayette Reneau, Red Newt and Atwater are just a few of several respected wineries that attend and obviously benefit from selling wine there. Sure, there’s no Wiemer or Ravines table, but two wineries do not represent a whole region.

The perception that the crowds can be unruly or misbehaved is not deserved as the overall party atmosphere is not much worse than what I’ve seen in tasting rooms on a Saturday afternoon, it’s just on a larger scale. For the most part even the most extreme tasters are still positive and trying their best to allow everyone to enjoy themselves.

There were a surprising number of dry wine drinkers at my table. We poured through more pinot noir than anything else and the biggest seller was a cabernet-merlot blend. Sure there were plenty of sweet tasters but they didn’t speak for everyone.

I do admit that the Finger Lakes Wine Festival will never replace actually going to a winery, meeting the winemaker or walking through the vineyards, but not everyone who supports the industry needs to do that.

The truth is, the event features wine as a collective experience of tens of thousands of people from all walks of life. If nothing else, the festival serves as a reminder that wine doesn’t have to be just for the few, but in reality is for the many. It deserves a hat tip for its success and interest it creates in New York wine.