So here’s the deal. There I was, in long-sleeved summer shirt, long pants and dress shoes. I was sweating and hadn’t even had a sip of wine after hiking up the dusty Cherry Avenue, past farmhouses and vineyards to Tawse, the Vineland site of the International Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration (or IC4 for you “cool” insiders out there).
It was obvious I had over-dressed once I saw the owner of the venue, Moray Tawse, wearing what can only be described as a Bermuda swim suit (complete with a sailboat and sunset design) and a golf shirt, the very epitome of casual attire.
Crap, what was I thinking?! It’s like 42C in the shade and feels like 50. The owner of the place has set the bar on the dress code at swim trunks (they may have been shorts, I didn’t ask), and I’m standing in the heat melting and looking at a table of sort-of chilled Chardonnay that goes on forever.
I’m talking about all of this with an acquaintance, who really doesn’t want to hear anymore complaining, and says: “Man up, it’s summer in Ontario, what were you expecting?”
Which, of course, is right, even considering that this was a “cool climate Chardonnay” event. So with an increasingly soaked shirt, I dove head-first into a table of 100 Chardonnays from around the world brought to Tawse by 56 winemakers at the main event for IC4.
It was billed as an “evening of sensational sipping, extraordinary food (OK, it was good but impossible to make it extraordinary under the circumstance) and incredible live music (true!), set amongst the vines on Niagara’s famous Bench.”
As legendary folk musician Murray McLauchlan (I interviewed him for a paper in the Yukon in the 80s over breakfast and he sent his eggs back to the chef three times, but he seemed a tad less cranky now as the decades have passed, but, hey, so am I) played his sweet, catchy, melodic tunes, I joined the crush of tasters for an around-the-world taste of Chardonnay, the one grape that many in Niagara say is the region’s star (I think the Riesling folks might beg to differ, but that’s a debate for another day).
The Chardonnays presented showed the vast stylistic differences from around the world with this often-maligned variety. Niagara, of course, was well represented with many of the top Chardonnays produced locally, and small samplings from Burgundy, Italy, New York, New Zealand, B.C.’s Okanagan Valley, Prince Edward County, California, Oregon, Austria, Chile and likely a few regions I’m missing.
It’s hard to draw conclusions from the tasting, other than to say Niagara has both come a long way in terms of quality Chardonnay but, also, there is still room to close the gap on some of the major Chardonnay producers from Burgundy. Or, conversely, should Niagara even aspire to the style of Chablis, Meursault, Pouilly-Fuisse or Puligny-Montrachet? Or should they just let Niagara’s terroir express the best of what we do here and improve on that?