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!
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