2010 Vidal Icewines

Neither Vineland Estates Winery nor Fielding Estates Winery are new to us, but we've never tried their icewines before.  Since I tend to prefer icewines from the Niagara River sub-appellation I wasn't quite sure to expect.

Vineland Estates was our first stop.  They started by serving their 2007 Vidal Select Late Harvest, featuring an easy to find nose of apple and honeysuckle, and the flavours of really good apple cider: apple, cinnamon, orange, honey and spices.  The wine's brilliant acidity offsets the sweetness for a very clean finish.  This wine is an easy 90, impressive for its price of $18.95 / 375 ml.  Although it certainly doesn't need food, Vineland set up a creative station of apple slices on sticks which we then dipped in warm maple syrup and ground hazlenuts.  Aside from the hazlenuts, though, none of the food and wine flavours really interacted at all.

The main event at Vineland, though, was the 2010 vidal icewine.  In all respects, the icewine was a concentrated version of the late harvest.  It reminded me very much of unpasteurized Greek honey, which probably isn't a helpful reference for many people.  Since I agree completely with Vineland's tasting notes on this one, I'll reproduce them here; "Possessing all the pure, raw power you would expect, this wine also surprises as it is expertly wrapped within package of elegance and refinement. Heady essences of orange blossom, crème caramel, apricot and honey are all in abundance. On the palate the sumptuous, sweet extract is made lacy by the bright balancing acid."  Given the slight toastiness, and golden colour, I'm surprised this wine is not oaked. We rated it 89, also a good value at $40 / 375 ml.

Vineland paired this delectable wine with prosciutto wrapped smoked gouda-style cheese topped with apricot-jalapeno jelly.  This daring combination successfully captured all the right opposites: acidic, fruity and sweet against creamy, salty and spicy.  This suggests to me that either of these dessert wines could actually be served during an appetizer course instead of at the end of a meal.

Our last stop of the day, Fielding Estate, also featured its 2010 vidal icewine, but paired it rather unconventionally with a chocolate brownie topped with cayenne spiced chocolate icing. Altogether, this was a terrible idea. Theoretically, the sweetness of the wine should counter the heat of the pepper, but in this case, the latter was just too much. Also, the rich chocolate of the brownie completely obliterated the taste of the wine; a cab franc icewine would have better held its ground.

To be perfectly fair, this icewine did win a silver medal at InterVin 2011, but so did Angels Gate's 2009 pinot noir, and I've poured some of that down my sink. It also won silver at the 2011 Canadian Wine Awards, which is hard to discredit.  It is also entirely possible that I am allowing the terrible pairing to unfairly skew my judgement. With all that in mind, though, I would have a hard time rating this wine any higher than 84.  Although it is advertised as well balanced, it's actually quite cloying.  It is light coloured and light tasting, featuring apricot, honey, and possibly lemon.  Chris also wants me to mention that the brownies weren't great either!

Cab Franc Icewine Pairing

Last Sunday marked our second icewine festival and the 1 year anniversary of Newlywined. One of these years, we'll take advantage of some of the other festival offerings, such as the gala, or the Twenty Valley street festival, or the wine and cheese seminars. This year, though, we opted once again for the touring pass. At $40 per passport, I first rolled my eyes that the price had gone up by $10 since last year. However, they've added two additional tickets to each pass, for a total of 8 paired tastings, so the overall value has stayed the same.

As we planned our route, we had two objectives. We were eager to try the much anticipated (at least by me) 2010 vintages, and we were also looking for dessert ideas to pair with cab franc icewines. Our baseline for quality cab franc icewine is now the Peller 2010 (or the Jackson Triggs 2008) so with those in mind we set out once again for Hinterbrook Winery and for Niagara College Teaching Winery.

Hinterbrook

Along with its 2010 cab franc icewine, Hinterbrook offered white chocolate pudding in dark chocolate cups. I've tried dark chocolate with this type of wine many times, and had always been worried that the white chocolate would be drowned out by the wine, or that it would make the wine seem sour by comparison. In this case, it was actually the dark chocolate cup that overpowered the wine. Apart from that, the creaminess of the pudding blending quite nicely with the icewine and the flavours were of surprisingly equal intensity. I am no longer going to be afraid of trying my favourite white chocolate raspberry tart with a bottle of that Peller 2010.

I was especially curious to try Hinterbrook's icewine because its summer offerings last year were full of so many interesting fruit flavours. The nose on the wine was different; yeast was definitely detectable, but Chris and I struggled to describe the fruit.  Cherry?  Strawberry?  Some type of citrus holding it all together?  I've got it: fruit punch!  It actually reminded me of a red fruit punch drink I would get as a kid which came in the same small bottles as apple juice and orange juice to make you think it was real juice too.  The cherry-dominated fruit punch carried through to taste, joined by a hint of spice.  The structure of the wine was not quite acidic enough, leaving the wine tasting a little like syrup.  However, the dark chocolate cup did alleviate that.  Finally, the finish was unremarkable.  Chris and I agreed on a rating of 84.

Niagara College

Let's start with the labels.  NCTW's "Dean's List" brand labels have been redesigned to look like report cards, in keeping with the teaching focus of the winery.  Aside from being cute, though, they also contain all of the wine's tasting notes on them, a very useful feature.  Onto the wine, also a 2010 cab franc icewine, which has a lot of distinguishing features.  Chris described the nose as candied apple - both the candy part and the apple part.  I thought of one of my favourite gelato combinations: strawberry-limone.  The predominant flavour is maraschino cherry, also with some spice (nutmeg?), held together by a wonderfully full caramel undertone which carries through on the medium-long finish.  Chris and I rated this wine 90 and 88, respectively.

NCTW also hit a homerun with its dessert pairing.  It can be difficult to find a dessert wine sweet enough to pair with cheesecake, except when you happen to have a culinary school across the road!  The Niagara College chefs solved this problem by increasing the cheese content and reducing the sugar.  Then they slathered it in salted caramel which further offset the sweetness and brought the wine's caramel undertone to the forefront.  Simply a brilliant pairing!

Cheap, but nothing to be ashamed of

Over the holiday season, I've had quite a few bottles of Angel's Gate 2010 Susreserve Riesling.  I actually stocked up on this one without even tasting it first based on the incredible 2009 vintage which scored at or above 90 by various reviewers and won a handful of awards.  So, for $13.95 per bottle, I didn't think there was much risk.

I describe the scent as a combination of honey, citrus and lemon, but other reviewers interpret this as pineapple.  The wine is definitely sweeter than the 2009, but without being too sugary.  There are two distinct layers of flavour to this wine: the slightly sour, citrus and mineral flavours that you would expect from a Beamsville Bench riesling, backed up by a smoother flavour of fruit (possibly pineapple and / or nectarine) and honey.  Since the susreserve method involves adding unfermented riesling juice to the finished wine, I wonder if those two parallel flavours come from the wine and the juice respectively.  The mouth feel is thin, but very consistent, with a longer than expected finish.  In a neat coincidence, I also did a blind review of this wine.  My sister-in-law served me a glass when I'd asked for white; I didn't realize at the time that she'd sent my husband out shopping so he just bought what he knew I liked!  Overall, this wine is very drinkable and refreshing.  After much debate, Chris and I both rated it an 86.