LENNDEVOURS

Arrowhead Spring Vineyards Joins the Trail

By Niagara Escarpment Correspondent Bryan Calandrelli

The Niagara Escarpment AVA added another winery this weekend as Arrowhead Spring Vineyards opened it doors to hundreds of chocolate-eating, wine-drinking visitors during the "Be Mine with Wine" trail event.

The Niagara Escarpment itself provides a spectacular backdrop for vineyards in this area which is quickly making Cambria, NY a wine destination thanks to the six wineries located within a few miles of one another. Temperatures in the single digits and wind chills flirting with minus twenty below didn't stop the hordes of tasters, myself included, from checking out the view from the newest winery and more importantly, tasting the wines.

After winding down an ice-covered driveway that makes you appreciate an AWD vehicle, I popped in with my fiancee. We were greeted by the husband and wife team of Duncan and Robin Ross, who stood proudly behind a tasting table and in front of several large windows that offer a spectacular view that stretches all the way to Lake Ontario: several miles of rural farmland, vineyards, and farm houses. The ambience at Arrowhead Spring is friendly but serious, with Duncan and Robin's wines on full display - several of which were flanked with medals they've won since they started making wine at home many few years ago.

The first wine we tried was a 2006 Riesling with grapes sourced from the Finger Lakes Region. True to form with shale-stone influenced flavors, this wine could have easily been mistaken for one of the established and acclaimed wineries of the Finger Lakes. With a slight effervescence, this crisp, clean young white wine is quite pleasing.

The two red wines that are available to taste are made with grapes sourced from California and elsewhere New York State. The "Apogee" is made in a Super Tuscan style with sangiovese,  cabernet franc and merlot. The Arrowhead Red is a familiar Bordeaux-inspired, multi-state blend. Both reds are full bodied, well balanced and extremely smooth with 22 months in French oak. I picked up the Apogee blend as it seemed to have a bigger punch, with more character and complexity.

In what I think is a compliment,  you'd never guess that these red are partly made from California grapes, as they don't have any one overpowering quality that dumbs them down to fruit bomb status. Also mentioned as "coming soon" on the menu was a Vidal Ice wine and a chardonnay.

Later that night, when I had a few hours to contemplate another weekend where the success of the wine trail here is getting more and more tangible, I was trying to remember what I thought of the newest winery on the trail's offerings. While I don't have any one big specific tasting note on these wines, I feel that both reds had a seamlessness that points to meticulous sorting of grapes and blending of wines in the cellar. In a region that doesn't really have one big red grape, like merlot on Long Island for example, the careful blending of varietals is going to be the only way to compete with warmer regions that can consistently ripen grapes like cabernet sauvignon to where they resemble what people are used to drinking. From what I tasted this weekend, Arrowhead Spring Vineyards seems like they have the right idea. E

Even though their vines were barely old enough to walk this past summer, they did produce a fair amount of fruit due to the hot and dry growing season of 2007. So hopefully it won't be too long before we get to try some estate grown samples from the new winery on the block, and by block I mean that huge limestone shelf we call the Niagara Escarpment.

And for all you other wine geeks out there, you might want to know that they planted syrah (in addition to merlot, cab sauv, cab franc, chardonnay, and an experimental row of malbec). I know, I know. Syrah is a warm weather grape... but don't mention that to a handful of wineries in Ontario, or the few wineries in the Finger Lakes that are gambling on it.

And please don't bother Duncan and Robin with your questions as to whether they can ripen the star of the Cote-Rotie. It may just make one hell of a spicy sexy fruity red here in the future. That is, if we keep having these growing seasons a la 2007. And you thought pinot noir was a stretch up here.

The Sweet Hereafter

By Bryan Calandrelli, Niagara Escarpment Correspondent

One of the coolest parts about living in an area with a burgeoning wine region has to be the fact that you get to literally watch history unfold. Of course, some history takes place outside in the kind of cold that burns your lungs and freezes your eyeballs, but when I regain feeling in my fingers I’ll be able to look back on January 3 of this still-new year as the date that marks the first local harvest of ice wine grapes at not one but two local wineries. When temperatures dropped into the teens for two days earlier this month – long enough for the Vidal grapes on the vine to freeze solid — I got the call to be in the vineyard before sunrise for harvest.

Did I mention it was cold? For ice wine, there’s no other time to do it. There’s usually a narrow window of time within which wineries have to harvest and press these grapes. Even a slight, five-degree warm up into the twenties can affect the concentration of the pressed juice, and I quickly realized time is of the essence. Luckily, our area experienced an ideal two-day cold snap during which Schulze Vineyards and Winery (where I pitched in) and Niagara Landing became the first in the region to harvest and press grapes for what should be an exciting vintage for ice wine.

Even if you're not familiar with the Niagara Escarpment region, you may well have heard of Niagara Peninsula, Niagara-on-the-Lake or Ontario wines — which means chances are you’ve heard of ice wine too. Usually packaged in 375ml bottles — with price tags quite often upwards of $90 for the half bottle — these wines are decadent, internationally sought after and critically acclaimed. Since the American Niagara region is only just across the Niagara River, the same general geology and climate extends in to the US side of the border. 

Canadian wineries have been making world-class ice wines for decades now, and they seem to have the whole process down. On our side of the border, the wineries are learning as they go. Late in the growing season, the vines are prepared by placing netting around the rows to catch clusters if they fall from high winds or heavy precipitation. When I arrived (did I mention it was cold?), the wind was calm with light snow. It was extremely surreal to be out in a vineyard in these conditions. The only noise I could hear was the sound of frozen grapes hitting the bins below and the crunching of snow at my feet. The Canadian wineries do an excellent job of romanticizing the harvest, and I always thought that this was all marketing, but there is something very special about being there working in extreme conditions, on the one or two days of year and in only one of a few regions where nature can provide the conditions to make this unique wine.

As I tasted the grapes and drank the fresh juice from the first crush, I really got to thinking about the future of ice wine here. There’s every indication from what I tasted that this years ice wine vintage should make some exquisite wines. Even so, I often ponder how wine regions all over seem to grapple with identity issues with regards to the grapes that are cultivated within. Is Merlot Long Island's signature grape? Well, yeah. So it only stands to reason that Riesling has to be the official grape of the Finger Lakes. Up here, there's the pinot noir buzz. There's the "well they can only make good white grapes cause it's so cold" belief. And there's always the hybrid and university-lab-engineered grape contingent. Well I’ll throw another log onto the fire. Could it be that in the near future if you’re drinking a Niagara Region wine, it might just turn out to be an American Niagara ice wine? That would be sweet.

Now We've Got the Niagara Escarpment Covered Too

The LENNDEVOURS team just keeps growing of late.

I'm happy to report that Bryan Calandrelli has joined the squad as our Niagara Escarpment correspondent. Of course, Bryan isn't a newcomer to blogs by any means.

Many of you will recognize him from his two wine blogs Water Into Wino and Niagara Escarpment.net,

Bryan moved to the Niagara Escarpment earlier this year from New York City, where he and his fiancee spent an almost unreasonable amount of time driving back and forth from the East End of Long Island on wine-tasting jaunts. When he doesn't have his nose deep in a wine glass, Bryan is a camera operator/director of photography for network and cable television
shows.

And, he's hitting the ground running here on LENNDEVOURS, offering this mini-report from the Escarpment:

With Schulze Vineyards and Winery kicking off the fall harvest with a machine harvested crop of juicy Niagara grapes, my first foray into farm work went straight to my shoulder and neck. My job was to frantically rake grapes from the middle of the bladder press to the edges as owner Martin Schulze pushed them off the harvester. There are only a few seconds between
a full press or an overflow of grapes onto the ground -- and after a fifteen
tons of grapes, it's hard not to feel it. After two days of work and almost 3000 gallons of Niagara pressed (just minutes after picking), the sparkling wine I chugged during the process numbed any long term physical damage I might have brought upon myself.

A few days later, a burning sensation in my lower back signaled the first vinifera grape harvest here on the Niagara Wine Trail. The unusually hot summer of 2007 has worked its magic on several young vines around here, and I went to Freedom Run Winery to help out at its first pinot noir harvest. But the excitement of wearing my barely used work boots and brandishing my own pruning shears was soon melted by record high temperatures in the Niagara Region. Physical discomfort nothwithstanding, the young pinot noir vines were picture perfect, with tight dark clusters of grapes. The only problem was that the vines are very low to the ground and crouching is the method of choice for reaching the clusters. Back pain tends to sneak up on you and I can only compare it to someone running a hot iron down my back. At the same time, Schulze Vineyards and Winery were harvesting their merlot
crop.

When I lived in NYC, my iPod went a long way to making any subway ride tolerable, and my naivete convinced me that hard labor in a vineyard would be enjoyable with the right soundtrack. Well...I was wrong. But the growing season here has been awesome thanks to such a warm year, and it's a good feeling to know that my hard work will help produce some memorable wines. In
the meantime, I'm waiting to hear back from a few other wineries to get an update on their harvests, but there's no doubt that things are ramping up -- and you can feel the excitement in the unseasonably warm air.