chickenfeet

Saturday the lemur and I went down to Niagara on a wine tasting/buying trip.  Niagara really falls into two broad subregions; the Beamsville Bench and adjacent areas on the escarpment and the low lying areas near the lake/river in Niagara on the Lake and St.David's.  The former has sloping vineyards with thin clay overlying limestone.  The latter is more alluvial clay and gravel.  Unsurprisingly, aromatic white varietals do well on the limestone while Bordeaux red varietals tend to do better lower down.  Since we can only manage 5 or 6 wineries in a trip and there's a fair bit of actual Bordeaux in the cellar we decided to stay up on the escarpment.  We weremainly looking for Riesling and Gewurz but we also had an eye out for Baco Noir.  It's a hybrid that does very well on the escarpment yielding rather unusual smokey, brambley wines.

We found plenty of excellent wines in the categories we were looking for at Hernder, Henry of Pelham, Staff and 13th Street.  What was more surprising is the number of excellent Pinot Noirs we found.  Pinot ought to do well on the Bench but so often we've found the wines to be dull and insipid.  Not this trip.  We found a number of rather good Pinots and a couple of really excellent ones at Flat Rock.  Their 2009 Reserve is quite the best Pinot I've tasted from outside Burgundy.  Surprisingly perhaps we had no luck with Gamay; 13th Street has been a reliable source in the past, but they did have a really excellent Cab/Merlot.

All in all a successful foray.