Tag: Niagara

This is my second year interviewing winemakers in Ontario about their latest grape harvest and wine production.  To get a more complete picture of the harvest I asked the following questions to three winemakers in three different grape growing regions of southern Ontario, which should have some differences in climate and harvest.  The three winemakers I interviewed this year are:…

I enjoy reading books.  My interests, in particular, are around health & wellness, history, and food & wine.  When I can find a fictional book that covers history as a backdrop, and then add in food & wine, that makes me very interested to read it.  When I was contacted by Canadian author, M.L.Holton, to read her latest novel “Trillium”…

For the past few years, I have been covering the BC harvest by interviewing winemakers and finding out how the weather affected this year, what they may be doing new, and other tidbits of information.  But I had not interviewed Ontario winemakers, to find out about their harvest, until today.  I used basically the same questions to the BC and…

This past year I tasted a tremendous number of wines from around the world, but some wines really resonated with me.  It may have been the great balance of fruit, sugar, acidity for a white wine, or the fruit, tannins and minerality in a red wine, or something else. Something that made the wine stand above the other wines.  Could…

While attending the International Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration (i4C) I tasted a small lot Chardonnay, 2015 vintage, by Thirty Bench Wine Makers from the Beamsville Bench in Ontario.  That wine stood out among the other Chardonnays that I had tasted at i4C.  So once the i4C was over, and I had some time to visit a few wineries, I made…

As promised I have enclosed my tasting notes for the wines I sampled at the three International Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration seminars.  Many of these Chardonnay come from Ontario, but there are also wines from BC, California, Chile, France and more.  My notes are not as detailed as notes I make from my structured tastings at home, but should give…

Don’t we all love sparkling wine, whether it is high end champagne, or cremants, cavas and more? At the third of the International Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration seminars, we learned more about how dosage affects sparkling wines aromas, flavours, and balance.  This was a bit more technical in details compared to the other earlier seminars, but well worth it.  Sparkling…

This was the second seminar in our three seminars on Day 1 of the International Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration.  This seminar’s goals according to the organizers are to answer the following, “Winegrowers love Chardonnay for its versatility. 10 winemakers will defend the stylistic decisions they make with each vintage, from homages to Old World classic styles to innovative interpretations that stretch the…

The Seventh Annual International Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration (i4C) has wrapped up in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.  It was a series of seminars, lunches, and dinners that filled an entire weekend from July 21-23, 2017.  I was privileged to be invited to attend this event; coming from British Columbia.  We are also a cool climate region, and I was glad to see…

At the i4C+ Celebration on July 21-23, 2017 there will be 59 cool climate chardonnay producers; 25 wineries from Ontario and 34 from around the world.  There will be 2 wineries from BC too.  And as I mentioned in my previous article on the i4C+ Celebration, while the focus is Chardonnay there will also be Pinot Noir, Gamay, Cab Franc,…