Fresh summer grapes on the vine( Photo by David Warrenchuk)
garagistes and great wines:
THE NEW NIAGARA
By Sylvia Jansen, Sommelier( ISG, CMS), CSW
It is early on a Wednesday evening, and the tables at Via Allegro in west Toronto are already full. As I leaf through the wine list( a book the size and weight of the Toronto Yellow Pages), I ask the Sommelier for something interesting in Niagara wine. She nods, and returns a few moments later with a tasting flight of wines from half a dozen small and medium wineries.“ Have a taste, and let me know what you think,” she says, excusing herself.
Wendy Votto, the head Sommelier at Via Allegro, knows what she is doing. She does not need to stand over us and lecture about how good Niagara’ s wines are; she just pours out a few samples and lets the wines speak for themselves. And they do: in fact, they speak eloquently.
Our impromptu tasting was a flight of Niagara red wines: a Pinot Noir from a producer near Beamsville; a Cabernet Franc from the Niagara Bench, south of Vineland; a blend from down the road near Niagara-on-the-Lake. The wines were different from one another in grape varieties and the use of blends; but what brought them together was a similar thread of elegance, style, food-friendly weight, and body.
There’ s something exciting about Niagara’ s wines, whether from long-standing producers, or from garagistes, the small, focused wineries that now dot the Peninsula. The best are an array of striking whites and reds from cool climate-loving varieties, and stunning blends that defy description. There are Icewines, which send the good reputation of our tiny market to the world. Some Niagara producers are even developing interesting dried grape wines on a commercial level.
Among the new elite is Tawse Winery, a quality-focused garagiste-style winery near Vineland on the Niagara Bench. Tawse is built on the principle that traditional artisanal winemaking can be married with state-of-theart technology to produce exceptional premium wines.“ The Niagara Bench is like Burgundy,” says Brad Gowland, Winery Manager at Tawse.“ We have great potential.” He realizes that a comparison with Burgundy, a place
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