A Niagara winemaker’s take on Vintage 2010

Note: This is taken straight from the Creekside blog The Cellared Life, true tales from the production side at Creekside Estate Winery, by winemaker Rob Power. I thought it was an honest and detailed look at the 2010 vintage from the view of a winemaker.

Vintage report 2010
Thursday, 9th December 2010

By Rob Power, Creekside winemaker

I hate writing vintage reports.

Whatever is recorded runs the risk of spewing either dangerous generalities (“better for whites than reds”), mind-numbing minutiae (“accumulated growing degree days at veraison were 14.5% above a ten-year historical average”) or meaningless marketing hyperbole (“vintage of the century”).

Sometimes you’ll see the hat-trick: all three at once.

And Niagara compounds the difficulty. Where else in the wine world do you find a harvest that can span 8 weeks from first sauv blanc to last cab sauv with two dozen other varieties in between. Throw in early sparkling base and late harvest icewine and you get my drift: generalize at your own risk. We see a lot of wild weather in Ontario between Labour day and Hallowe’en.

Twitchy marketers also tend to get in the way of a good concise vintage report. Sun good, rain bad. The spin is always on. Example: seemingly excessive precipitation during the growing season (a physically measurable quantity) will often be translated by the marketer’s Enigma coder into “elegance” in the wine. “There’s a 40% chance of elegance overnight and tomorrow morning.”

So having said all that psychobabble, how can I in good faith summarize 2010 vintage, and why the hell would you want to read it? Not sure, and really not sure, respectively. But here goes anyways.

Preamble/backstory: Every summer my wife and I throw 2 dogs, 2 bathing suits and 17 cases of wine into the car and drive to PEI to lie on the beach. When we get back in mid-August, the first thing I do is take the dogs for a run out back through my neighbour’s Baco vineyard. Progress of veraison in those vines relative to the date helps me figure out how advanced the season is. And in Niagara, where we need every bit of heat we can get to properly ripen late-season reds before the snow flies, a couple of weeks ahead is pure gold.

Spring 2010 saw uncommonly early bud-break. Good weather allowed the plants to hold that torrid ripening pace; consensus among our farmers was that we were 2-2.5 weeks ahead of normal by about mid-June. When I walked the Baco vineyard on August 9, the sight of a lot of happy purple grapes made me happy too.

More backstory: any Niagara winemaker will tell you that the biggest determinant of vintage quality around here is the weather AFTER Labour day. We have seen promising vintages in the past get drowned in a September deluge of Biblical proportions, and have watched mediocre reds morph into intensely ripe stunners during a beautiful week of Indian summer in October.

In 2010, no late downpours, but no big heat spikes either. There was a near brush with crippling frost in October, but the sun-god rose and smiled just in time. Slow and steady ripening after Labour day won the race, and I do consider it a win of potentially epic proportions (HYPERBOLE ALERT!!). The two-week head start that we got in spring has led to the earliest harvest finish we have ever had here at Creekside. Last fruit through the crusher was 12 tonnes of cab franc at 24.9 Brix on October 29. Overall, the ripest reds we have ever had, including 2007. All the marketers that referred to 07 as the “vintage of the century” might be wishing they’d kept that old chestnut in the cupboard.

Sauv blanc came in clean and very ripe, flavours closer to tropical New Zealand than austere Sancerre. Gris stayed rot-free and held it’s delicate tree-fruit character despite the August heat. Ditto for chardonnay. We did not harvest any Riesling this year so I can’t comment there, but our tiny perfect QRV Viognier block came in (as always) tiny but perfect.

I’d better say something “less positive” here or you’ll think this has been ghost-written by an evil marketer. Acidity in the whites was much lower than normal, which forced a few picking decisions not necessarily related to flavour development. Natural alcohol levels hover in the mid-12s, which is higher than usual. So expect the whites to be in more of a warm-climate style and structure than is usual in Niagara. Great flavours, though.

As mentioned, reds were ripest ever, in terms of both sugar and phenolic/physiological ripeness (please always remember that sugar does not necessarily move in lockstep with other ripening processes). Merlot has awesome colour, blacker than most cabs and shirazes even. Shiraz is a beguiling mix of spice and fruit, like the northern Rhone in a good year. Cabs are incredible, no trace of green flavours, gorgeous ripe balanced tannins. We only did a bit of Pinot, which is classic Niagara in style.

All in all (DANGEROUS GENERALITY ALERT!!) it was a great vintage here in Niagara. Can’t wait to see how the all the big reds turn out.

There. Done. Stop the hatred.