Ontario Cabernet Franc: Observations From All Wines Reviewed

Cabernet Franc has found a remarkable home in the diverse terroirs of Ontario, producing wines that are both vibrant and distinctive. Over the past several months I’ve tasted through 28 different bottles of Cabernet Franc, primarily from the Niagara peninsula, but also two bottles from Prince Edward County.  I wanted to examine how the unique climate and soil composition of the Niagara Peninsula, and Prince Edward County, shaped the character of Cabernet Franc. With this final article, I examine the common aromas and flavours of these Cabernet Franc wines and try to see if there is some relationship between the soil type in the region and if there are any unique aromas and flavours for these wines.   Enjoy and learn.

The Ontario Cabernet Wines Reviewed

Here is the list of all the Ontario Cabernet Franc wines that I reviewed:

Winery Location

Here is a Google Maps‘ map showing the location of the wineries that provided Cabernet Franc samples for me to taste.  The map is centred on the Niagara Peninsula.  One winery, Grange of Prince Edward, is located in Prince Edward County, which is north and east of this map window.  You can pan across this map view to see the location of this winery.

Soil Maps

There is always much discussion about how soil affects grapes.  The most common relationship is how limestone provides high acidity, a mineral backbone, and elegant, flavours to Chardonnay.  What soils are in the Niagara region, and does soil type affect Cabernet Franc’s aromas and flavours?  I was able to merge a jpg of a generalized soil map (1:100,000 scale which is quite coarse) of the Niagara region with Google Earth Pro which contained the locations of the Ontario wineries that submitted Cabernet Franc wines for me to review. 

From the overlay of the winery locations with the generalized soil map, I extracted the following soils associated with each winery location.  It must be noted that the vineyard, containing the Cabernet Franc grapes, may be at a different location from the winery, but I had to assume the vineyard is located at the winery.

The only soil type that has a relatively large number of samples is the “mainly clay loam till”, so I did a little more analysis on those tasting notes in the next section below. 

Word Clouds

One of the ways that I like to visualize the aromas and flavours of a group of wines is via a word cloud.  A word cloud picks tallies the number of times certain words are shown and then draws them as a large size for the most used, to a small size for the least used words.  Colour can also be added to the text to enhance the differences in word usage.  Here are the word clouds generated from my tasting notes for the 28 different Ontario Cabernet Franc wines.  Most of the wines were from the 2022 and 2023 vintages.

(I used https://www.freewordcloudgenerator.com/generatewordcloud to generate the word clouds.)

Aromas

The largest words in this word cloud are red, fruits, plums, cedar, cherries, cinnamon, and oak.  All these words are very good descriptors for Cabernet Franc and show that these wineries are producing wines with prominent red fruit aromas and that the wines have oak barrel contact.  On the intensity side, medium is largest followed by medium-plus, showing that these wines are fruit-expressive on the nose.  I note that the word “sweet”, shows up, but would better be termed “fruity” as you cannot smell sweet.  Fruity and sweet are commonly used interchangeably.  As these wines are still young, tertiary aromas like leather or figs are quite small in this word cloud.  As the wines gain more age in the bottle, these tertiary aroma terms should get larger in a word cloud.

Flavours

Niagara Cabernet Franc shows red fruits and cherries with black fruit and pepperiness on the palate.  Medium to medium-plus body.  There is a lesser amount of candied fruit, leather, plums, and bitterness from these wines.  Smooth, round, and soft show up below the previous groupings of words.  Overall I think a good representation.

Aromas and Flavours for “Mainly Clay Loam Till”

As I mentioned, the soil type “mainly clay loam till” was the most common type at five winery locations, I generated word clouds for those Cabernet Franc wines.  Is there much difference from the overall word clouds?

Comparing these aromas to the full wines tasted, red fruits, plums, berries, cedar, spice, and cherries are common to both and more often mentioned.  I think the intensity of aromas for this subset of wines is lighter than for the full set of wines.  

Reviewing flavours, red fruits and acidity stand out in both, along with cherries and pepperiness.  There are more differences in flavours.  The whole set shows more black fruits, with round and soft, while the subset notes lean and light.  Tartness and bitterness are indicated between the two datasets, but these words are not as prominent in either word cloud.  Both datasets also show the wines as medium to medium-plus in body. 

Do you see any other similarities or differences in the aromas and flavours?  This was an interesting experience.

Thank You

Thank you to all the wineries that participated in my comparison of Niagara Cabernet Franc, as well as Wines of Ontario, who put out my request to their members.  You can order the wines that I tasted from the winery websites.  Those links are in the articles I listed at the top of this page.  Some wines may also be available at LCBO stores. In my articles, I did note which wines are at LCBO stores.  

I hope we may get Ontario Cabernet Franc wines here in BC when the interprovincial trade barriers come down.  There are many nice wines to enjoy.