I know you are about to scream at your screen. Not another column about the health benefits of drinking wine. Delete. Wait, hear me out. Related: A wine prescription for cold and flu and Feeling under the weather? Drink wine In a recent joint study between the Health Sciences Department, Brock University and the Oncology Department, McMaster University, […]
↧
Are you getting your daily serving of wine?
↧
Telmo's Spanish dream
Telmo Rodríguez the company is a small wine producer fashioning meager quantities from more DOs (and DOCAs) than can fit into a 620 x 400 jpeg. Telmo Rodríguez the man finds himself at the 20th anniversary year crossroads in celebrating the outgrowth of his dream. This critical juncture requires travel, evangelism and conceit, qualities the laser-focused, frank and facund winemaker possesses in spades. Read More
↧
↧
Wine experts Brock and roll, Brock on
Part two: 25th anniversary of the Cuvée 2014 Expert’s Tasting at Brock University Flights three, four and five: Pinot Noir, Red Blends and Wine Options. Related – When experts break wine together The Expert’s Tasting is more than just a study on Niagara wine. It eulogizes what came before, reflects back on what is lost and ultimately asks the […]
↧
When experts break wine together
With frozen Pond Inlet at Brock University as the backdrop to the 25th anniversary of the Cuvée 2014 Expert's Tasting, 160 industry professionals gathered to break wine together. The original congress in 1989 might have heard the whisper, "si tu id aeficas, ei venient." Fast forward to 2014 and Dr. Linda Bramble references Phil Alden Robinson's declaration in Field of Dreams, "if you build it they will come." Come they have, for 25 years running. Read More
↧
Winter white out wine, beer and food conditions
The winter that never ends. White out conditions, snow squalls, wind advisory and chill warnings. Everything just feels heavy. The OPP's request? Just stay home, Ontario. Prepare for the worst, hunker down and warm the belly with full-bodied wines, strong mocker, beer and hearty winter meals. The weather will step aside in April. Until then, satiate yourself. Read More
↧
↧
Godello's excellent Cuvée adventure
Doesn't every local wine writer's pilgrimage begin this way? There's 130 kilometres to Niagara Falls, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes (not really - the only thing we smoke is BBQ), it's blinding winter morning light out and we're wearing sunglasses. Well, one of us is. Read More
↧
Bottles, barrels, tanks and a vertical
Listening to Flat Rock Cellars' winemaker Jay Johnston rattle off the numbers and particulars of his 2013 Pinot Noir harvest you can't help but survey the odds of something preternatural. Vintage speculation for 2013 in Niagara has met with tempered interpretation, a play down on the effects of weather and generalizations that it was just another normal meets classic year. Nothing to see here. You sure about that? Read More
↧
March grape madness
Choosing wines from a wall of brace and girder filled options presents as much a degree of difficulty as picking winners from an NCAA March Madness bracket. When it comes to teenage basketball, do you stay the favourite course and go with all number one seeds? Should you think underdog, like Coastal Carolina Chanticleers or the Albany Great Danes? Who will be this year's 2013 Florida Gulf Coast Eagles? Or the other 2013 final-four sleepers from Wichita State? Or Virginia Commonwealth in 2011? Butler, Davidson, George Mason, Kent State, Indiana, Loyola Marymount, Villanova, this list goes on. Who can forget the Jimmy V. coached 1983 North Carolina State Wolfpack? Read More
↧
On a wine and a prayer
We're going to begin the last week of March with a quartet of white wines as a prayer for the hopes of warmer weather. A bottle full of fresh and sprite grapes to be brought into the temple as a gift to lay down at the altar, sacrificial ferments meant to appease the harbinger gods of spring. A prayer on the back of a wine angel to usher us out of the cold, to drink in long time missing, rarefied air. Read More
↧
↧
The death of wine scores?
Not so fast. As time goes by, I am hearing less comments like, “well that one got a 95,” and “that one is better value because it got a 90.” Wine ratings may increasingly becoming maligned and less frequently employed but that does not mean they don’t have their place. Scores continue to be necessary as a way […]
↧