Sipping by cycle (page 2)
In truth, Medhurst is 27. He leads us into the vineyard and explains why it is profitable
to snip off and discard many of the grapes while they are still as green as peas, thereby
concentrating all the natural sugars into the fruit that remains. And he points out the giant
propellers that blow warm air down onto the vines when the temperature approaches the -20°C
boundary between dormancy and death. All of Niagara’s newly pressed prosperity, he
says, depends on its relatively tepid microclimate.
“When you look at these bushes,” announces Medhurst, “you see $50 bottles
and $8 bottles.” Everything depends on the grapes themselves: how many, how plump,
how sweet.
Although he cannot possibly remember the glory days of Canadian wine — the bouquet
of Baby Duck, the nose of Spumante Bambino — young Medhurst admits that Jackson-Triggs’ corporate
progenitor, the Château-Gai unit of the Labatt beer empire, was a “pretty atrocious
wine division,” pumping out “some nasty stuff.”
Those days are gone forever, replaced — at Jackson-Triggs, at least — by mass-market
Cabernets and Chardonnays, fermented in 30,000-litre stainless steel rotating tanks. Medhurst
shows us how these mega-vats are chilled by external tubes of glycol, and he admits that
even some of the finest wines may have been sweetened with cane sugar and clarified with
powdered egg whites or the livers of fish.
“We learned that from the French,” he says.
Yet this does not diminish the Ontario vintner’s passion to take on the world with
the best wines that can be crafted from the grapes this soil feeds. What matters, says Medhurst
and everyone else we meet, is what is inside the bottle — not a cute animal on the
label, not the appellation of some motley cru and certainly not how much it costs.
“Never confuse price with quality,” the young man declares when, after one hour
and 15 minutes of pedalling and prattling, we finally get to drink something other than water.
In a pine-panelled salon that leads conveniently into the Jackson-Triggs retail store, Medhurst
offers what he calls “a structured tasting.”
This begins with a 2006 Sauvignon Blanc that we are told is “very fruity and highly
herbaceous,” proceeds to a 2003 Proprietors’ Grand Reserve Chardonnay (born in
wooden casks), which, to my simpleton’s palate, tastes far smoother and oilier and
more delectable, and concludes in a fine, earthy red called Meritage that, I must admit,
I’ve been buying and enjoying for years.
Back on the bicycles now, heading for a sandwich and a salad and more Meritage at a picnic
table at a vineyard down a concession road, then to a tiny establishment called Caroline
Cellars. Many of Niagara’s wineries are like Caroline: family-run, producing only a
few cases of each variety, and housed in, well, a house.
It is at Caroline Cellars that winemaker Justine Lakeit pours a 2004 Riesling and teaches
us what she calls “the reverse whistle,” encouraging us to “activate the
retro-nasal passage” by sucking in some air to enliven the liquid on our tongues. Moving
from white to red and from dry to sweet, as is the custom, we sample a 2003 Merlot, a 2004
Pinot-Cherry “fun blend” and a 2004 Plum Wine that I pronounce, eight glasses
into the day, to be “like candy for grown-ups.”
At our next stop, as luck would have it, we encounter the duly crowned Grape King of Canada
(circa 1978) relaxing on his porch. If Noah was the first tiller of the soil and planter
of vines in the Bible, John Marynissen was the first vintner in Niagara to rip out the old
Concord grapes and pledge the roots of European Cabernets and Chardonnays to the Ontario
soil. Today, Marynissen Estates Winery sells 80 percent of its products at its own retail
store and the rest in direct shipments to restaurants.
I ask Marynissen, who is 83, about the fantastically expensive imported wines that are sold
across Canada.
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