Blog # 7 A Prince Edward County Favourite from a Great Vintage

I blogged last month about my trip to Prince Edward County and one of the wineries I visited was The Grange of Prince Edward. I have had many wines from a few different vintages from this estate and I must say they always impress me. Jeff Innes, the winemaker, is really doing some fabulous work at this estate and if you get a chance to try some of his wines I would highly recommend doing so. Finally, the LCBO has begun carrying their wines so they are becoming more and more available which is great news for anyone who likes authentic and original wines that have a true taste of Prince Edward County.

One of the wines I am most familiar with from The Grange is their Trumpour's Mill Gamay Noir. As I had explained in my past blog about Prince Edward County it was the 2005 vintage of this wine that was my first PEC wine experience. That wine was very impressive as I wrote earlier with a ton of personality and uniqueness. I had a couple bottles of the 2006 vintage which were good, but nothing extraordinary. Most recently I have tried their 2007 bottling, which I am glad to say is very, very good.

It does help that 2007 was a fantastic year for Ontario red wines. It was a hot dry summer that brought about drought like conditions. The red's, especially, have shown a lot of ripeness and extraction which is great as Ontario wines can lack that quality given the very cool climate. The whites I have tried have been less impressive as many were left too long and show a lot of over ripeness and lack of precision. Certainly this is winery dependent as well. The good news is that the 2007 Grange red wines that I have tried have been very good especially their Cab Franc (that I will post about soon) and their Gamay Noir.

The Grange of Prince Edward - Trumpour's Mill - Gamay Noir - 2007 - VQA Prince Edward County - Canada

The Grange of Prince Edward's Trumpour's Mill Gamay Noir is sourced from their Victoria Block vineyard which was first planted with 3,750 vines clone, 509 on SO4 in 2001. In 2004 an additional 2,500 Gamay vines were planted using clone 565. They crop the fruit out at about 4 tonnes per acre. The 2007 was harvested in October and fermented in stainless steel it then spent 12 months in French oak and was bottled in February of this year. In total the winery produced 1405 cases of this wine.

The wine is dark ruby in colour showing quite a bit of extraction from the hot and dry 2007 vintage. The nose is fascinating with notes of cherry, spicy red fruit, old leather, red licorice, and a gamey funk note reminiscent of the 2005. In the mouth the wine is purely delicious with a ripe, round and smooth medium body full of black current and cherry cola flavours with and subtle undertone of game . The finish is nice and long with mouthwatering notes of sour cherry coming to the fore. I love the wines uniqueness and its ablility to showcase its Prince Edward County personality. This has never been your average Gamay and the 2007 is no exception. This is definitely a must try for any wine lover especially if you want to see what the County is all about. At $15 the quality, value and terroir driven character of the wine make it a real bargain.

Very Good/Excellent.

I

Blog # 6 A Great Sparkler

Domaine de Vaugondy - Vouvray - Brut - NV

I had to write about a great sparkling wine I had last week as it was really impressive. Now that we are into the holiday season I am sure many people are looking to find good sparkling wine, but so many are expensive and just as many are cheap and quite awful. Personally, I love sparkling wine when it is well made it can be so interesting, delicious and downright refreshing. Unfortunately finding a really good sparkler that is also a good price can be rather difficult, so when I do find one I get quite excited about it.

This wine produced by Philippe Perdriaux proprietor of Domaine de Vaugondy in Vouvray, which is an appellation in the Loire Valley of France. In Vouvray pretty much the only grape that is grown is Chenin Blanc, which, although rather unfashionable right now, is easily one of the greatest white wine grapes in the world. It is really only rivaled by Riesling or very well made Chardonnay in its aging ability (100 year old Chenin's are still around), versatility (dry, sweet, sparkling) and pure reverence (Coulee de Serrant).

According to the North American importer for this wine, Sevier, Perdriaux is a small individual producer who grows his own grapes and makes his own wine. He grows only Chenin Blanc on steep hillside vineyards composed of siliceous clay and limestone. His vines are roughly 20 to 55 years old which he uses to craft a dry Vouvray, a semi dry Vouvray and this dry sparkling wine. His sparkling wine is made in the traditional method (methode traditionelle or methode classique) which is the same method used in Champagne. It is non vintage so it is made from reserve wines as well new ones, the perecentage of which I do not know. I also do not know the dosage level or date. It was just released at the LCBO last weekend and retails for $18.

The wine is pale golden almost ivory in colour. The nose begins with subtle notes of spiced pear, stone fruits and fresh hay with wafts of fresh dirt/tilled earth here and there. The wine begins explosively on the palate with a panoply of flavours including sweet lemon, spiced honey, almonds and red cherries. It then settles to a lovely long sweet mineral fruit finish complicated by more subtle soil/tilled earth notes. The wine is absolutely fascinating and complex but at the same time so delicious and refreshing. It is impeccably made, so well balanced and at this price is an amazing value. Excellent.

What I loved most about this wine is that it really is so delicious and so refreshing that you could actually drink it all night long. It is a great sparkling wine for this time of year because even the most casual wine drinking would find it really tasty. But for those wine nerds around there is so much complexity and nuance that you really could talk about it all night as well. So, so good is all I can say. If you don't believe me Peter Liem probably one of the greatest wine writers and experts on sparkling wine around, gave this wine a great review as well. If you haven't read his blog or articles in Wine and Spirits Magazine then I would highly recommend doing so.

Blog # 5 Wine and Air

The other night after arriving home from a dinner I decided that I wanted a glass of wine. I had a $8 bottle of Candidato Temperanillo Garnacha 2006 from Spain sitting around so I opened it. Now I have had this wine several times and love it as just a simple, delicious bottle that is so inexpensive you could have it every day if you wanted. It always has some nice strawberry and melted licorice notes with some oak on the nose. In the mouth it is simple, tasty and highly drinkable. So I had a glass which satisfied me so I put a stopper on it and left in on my kitchen counter to have some the next night.

I arrived home after work last night and thought well I will have a other glass of the wine. What a transformation! The nose had dropped all hints of oakiness and had become a floral/berry beauty and mouth to had become much rounder and smoother with replays of that same floral berriness, it was absolutely delicious. To say the least I was stunned mainly because at that price point I would never have thought it would improve so much. This experience got me thinking about wine's fascinating relationship with air.

To wine air is both it's best friend and it's worst enemy. After first being opened, wine especially younger ones, need air to truly express themselves. Certain wines, especially if they are well made, can take up to 48 hours if not more of air contact before they have reached their optimum drinking level. However, in the end air will ultimately kill the wine and render it undrinkable. Of course to complicate matters every wine is different. Some wines only need 15-20 minutes of aeration to open up, but some aged and more delicate wines might suffer greatly if exposed to too much air. In fact some wine writer's claim that it isn't necessary to decant wine at all and that just pouring it in your glass and swirling it is sufficient enough.

Personally, I think that wine needs some exposure to air to "open up" and express its full range of aroma's and tastes. I tend to always decant red wines unless I am only having a glass, but I do not really decant whites even though some argue that should be done as well. Obviously I don't decant sparkling wine, but I do prefer them once they have been opened for 20 minutes or so. So perhaps it is really a matter of personal taste as to how much air exposure one likes.

Now as I stated earlier this is all wine dependent. Some wines are very one dimensional and will taste relatively the same from the moment it is opened to hours afterwards. Where other wines will develop over several hours and take on a range of notes. I recall having a 1999 Perrier Jouet Belle Epoque Brut Champagne a couple of years ago that seemed to change every couple of minutes darting from flowers, to stone fruits to minerals and in various continually changing combinations. That bottle was opened for a couple of hours and it seemed to morph every few minutes.

All in all its actually a pretty complicated subject and I haven't even talked about aging wine and the minute exposure to air a bottle closed with a cork receives over time that helps it age. If you would like to read a fascinating article on the subject I would encourage you to read Jamie Goode's piece http://www.wineanorak.com/alternativeclosures.htm . Jamie Goode's website www.wineanorak.com is in my opinion one of the most informative, well written and interesting wine sites around.

I guess the best thing to draw from all this that wine and air is a complex and nuanced subject. I would encourage all of you, however, to try a little experiment. Buy a bottle it doesn't need to be expensive and pour yourself a glass and write down your tasting notes. Put a stopper on it and leave it to the next day and pour yourself another glass and take those notes, continue the trend until the bottle is done and draw your own conclusions. I think you may find the results very interesting and will only better inform all of us of the interesting relationship between wine and air.