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B.C. wine snobs are obsessing over this winery from... Ontario

When the 2016 Vancouver International Wine Festival announced that Canada would be the featured country, the League of Professional Wine Snobs (of which I’m a paying member) let out a loud sigh.

When the 2016 Vancouver International Wine Festival announced that Canada would be the featured country, the League of Professional Wine Snobs (of which I’m a paying member) let out a loud sigh.

wineWe all truly love the wines from our backyard, indeed they pole vault over their own benchmarks every vintage, but we go there a lot, and we kinda already know them. It’s an exciting time to watch the Okanagan (I hosted a roundtable with BC winemakers last week), I expect that the future books and movies about the valley’s formative heyday will feature our hairstyles and car models. It is, however, our backyard, with no exotic stories about Romans or adorable pronunciations of the word “freshness”, so the curiosity level dipped slightly when we learned that Canada would take centre stage.

But then I looked a tad closer at the lineup, and saw that they meant all of Canada, including regions with next to no exposure here, like Niagara and Nova Scotia. Living in B.C., you’d be forgiven for being surprised that Ontario makes any wine at all, it’s almost completely consumed domestically and cross-border wine trade regs can best be described as “Elliot Ness”. It’s altogether easier and quicker to sneak American wines into this province than Ontario wines, so imagine my surprise when I read that one of the featured wineries would be:

Hidden Bench, Beamsville Bench VQA, Niagara Peninsula. This winery has placed in the Canadian Wine Awards Top 10 every year since 2007 (winning Wine of the Year a couple times). With no way to try the wines, I dismissed it. “Can’t be that good”, I said. Friend after trusted friend came back from Ontario effusing about Hidden Bench and how great (and hard to get) it was. “Can’t be that good”, I said. Even when I saw this winery on the roster for Wine Fest, I hedged. “It’s going to disappoint”, I told myself. I charged into the conference centre with all of my protective armour. I’ve been hurt before.

When a winery lives up to its hype an angel should rightly get his wings. This is serious stuff – the tension of Loire wines balanced by a wise, civilized nose of understated fruit and layered deployment. The terroir of Beamsville, midway between Hamilton and Niagara Falls, is a salad of gravel, clay and silt on a largely flat topography intercut by streams that empty into Lake Ontario. It’s as foreign to me as any distant region, but I understand it a little better by drinking these site-driven, non-interventionist wines – all they do is harvest, crush, and wait. What you taste is that place.

The 2014 Estate Chardonnay is electric. After a very cold winter (you think our last winter was cold? “Hold my beer”, says Ontario), fruit set and veraison were delayed, and everything was pushed back by weeks, even the Chardonnay wasn’t harvested until near the end of October. The extra hang time boosted phenolic ripeness, and this Chard is balanced and stunning. The nose entices, with vanilla and apple pie, but once inside you find yourself playing Thumb War with a bear, and the bear is winning. Wondrous stuff. $42.49

The Pinot Noir from Beamsville’s Felseck vineyard is as close as Canada will come to Red Sancerre, the screaming minerality from the site (Felseck means “corner of the cliff”) props up the red cherry and raspberry under a veil of flowers and cast iron. Less bright than B.C. Pinot but runs several layers deeper. $53.99

Written by Jordan Carrier, Vintage Room Consultant at Everything Wine – River District.