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Malcolm Jolley: Cool Chardonnays for warm days

Commentary

Vineyards at Flat Rock Cellars, Niagara, looking north to Lake Ontario. July 2024. Photo credit: Malcolm Jolley

Chardonnay is one of the more successful and popular wine grape varieties to be planted in Niagara. And every July, since 2011, it is the focus of the region’s annual International Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration. I attended the 14th edition last week as a guest of Wine Country Ontario. It’s partly a conference, partly a media tour, and partly a series of ticketed events open to the public.

i4C (as everyone calls it) takes place over the course of four nights and four days along the wine making strip of the Niagara Peninsula. It attracts most of Niagara’s top producers, by sales or critical acclaim, as well as guests from other cool climate growing regions like Prince Edward County, the Okanagan Valley, France, Italy and South Africa.

While I tasted wine, I heard from producers at the conference’s events. This included panel discussions, meals, winery visits, and even the cocktail party atmosphere of an evening walk-around tasting–I received a thorough refresher course on what’s happening in the wine scene on the peninsula. Here are my main three takeaways.

Burgundization

There is a long-standing connection between Niagara and France’s Burgundy that’s based on three similarities: climate, soil and topography. The latitude of St. Catharine’s is 43 degrees. The latitude of Beaune is actually quite a bit north at 47.  However, the growing season and daylight hours of the two are alike and suited to Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.

The Niagara escarpment, over which the Niagara River falls, is made of limestone. It’s a different kind than the one in Burgundy, but is thought to produce a kindred effect. Burgundy also features a long ridge (or côte) under which most of its vines are grown. If you squint at these long elevations, they look the same.

These terroir similarities led Ontario producers to plant the Burgundian varieties of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, and the wines they produce invite favourable comparisons. But the real process of “Burgundization” (TM) in Niagara has more to do with the growing trend of making from and labelling the specific vineyards, or “blocks” from within them. The best known example of this trend is the current work of  winemaker Thomas Bachelder, who I wrote about in November 2022  and a few weeks ago in June.

Practically for a consumer, this means lots of different small lots of wines from lots of different producers every year. A winemaker might make only a few hundred bottles of wine from a small part of a grower’s vineyard. More than one producer might make wine from a single vineyard. Similar to Burgundy, interest, or at least some of it, shifts from producer to vineyard.

Wines from small lots are hard to market conventionally. A large chain is not going to be interested in the inventory management required from multiple SKUs (stock keeping units) of a small amount of product. A provincial near-monopoly that majority sales come from big multinational producers of alcohol of every kind even less so.

Outside of restaurant buyers, these Burgundized wines require alternative retail channels like shops at the winery or direct-to-consumer sales. Given the post-COVID liberalization of alcohol sales, there is a bit of chicken and egg dynamic at work.

I suspect some established producers are starting to make more small lots because they’ve established retail and hospitality programs, or monthly subscription wine clubs. Now, even the smallest mom-and-pop, out-of-a-shed producers will have some way to sell directly to producers, or find space at collective channels like the Niagara Custom Crush Studio.

Either way, it’s more wine and more fun.

Climate chaos

Climate chaos is less fun, though it’s a term I heard a lot when speaking to producers. Severe weather events are on the minds of winemakers around the world (not least B.C.’s  Okanagan Valley). I attended a i4C media wine tasting and dinner on the evening of the day after record breaking torrential rains that flooded Toronto. People were thankful the worst of it stayed on the north shore of Lake Ontario. There are no climate change deniers in the wine world.

Interestingly, one of the features of living in the climate change kill zone is forthrightness about it. As deleterious as vintage destroying events like a late frost, or powdery mildew from excess humidity might be, warmer weather has brought some salutary effects. The grapes get ripe every year…if they survive.

J-L Groux moved from France’s  Loire Valley to Niagara in 1989, eventually becoming director of winemaking at the lauded boutique winery Stratus. i4C held a media tasting of his Chardonnay going back as far as 2002, the winery’s first vintage, and 2000, when he made wine for Trius Winery. At it he joked, “I used to try to make warm climate wine in a cool climate, now I try to make cool climate wine in a warm climate.”

A generational shift

At the Stratus tasting of J-L Groux Wines was a much younger man who now holds the actual title of winemaker Dean Stoyka. Stoyka is one of a number of young bloods who are taking over the reins on wine making at many of the region’s top producers. Others include: Gabriel Demarco (Cave Spring), Morgan Juniper (16 Mile Cellar), Elisa Mazzi (Malivoire), Jessica Otting (Tawse), Andrea Perez Castillo (Flat Rock) and Matt Smith (Cloudsley). There are more young winemakers making small lot wines on the side too (see Burgundization above).

Apart from making me feel like an old man, it’s really nice to see new blood and new techniques applied at established wineries. Stoyka, for instance, is making more and more wine from amphora, a trend on the rise, especially for Chardonnay. Stoyka sees it as a way for young winemakers to make their own mark on Niagara wines.

This new generation is different. Like my digital native kids who have grown up with the internet, they’ve grown up in an Ontario wine scene that was already established. They seem to have absorbed lessons learned over the last 50 years but, like Morgan Juniper, who ages her wines for years before releasing them, are not afraid to add a little rebellious innovation. This seems healthy for the industry.

Next week I’ll report on some of the more interesting wines, wineries and winemakers I met over the course of i4C.

Malcolm Jolley

Malcolm Jolley is a roving wine and food journalist, beagler, and professional house guest. Based mostly in Toronto, he publishes a sort of wine club newsletter at mjwinebox.com.

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