By Rick VanSickle
Keeping up with the viral trend of the year, here’s a flashback to 2016 — a great vintage for Niagara red wines, but a very bad year for hair.
Also in this Niagara Wine Report: A true unicorn wine from Icellars revisited five years later, plus two Pinots, one from Cloudsley, the other from Bachelder, from the Twenty Mile Bench, top our recommendations for Niagara wines coming to Vintages on Saturday.
The hair was dealt with later in 2016, which was met with great joy from my long-suffering family, but the year 2016 lives on as one of the greatest ever for red wines in Niagara. It’s only bested by 2020, with 2010 and 2012 right up there as the finest vintages since 1998.
Wines in Niagara awarded the vintage 9½ out of 10 stars and noted that 2016 “was the perfect recipe to provide an excellent vintage. Virtually all grape varieties performed well in 2016 and were picked in pristine condition. This was a year to buy and hold those bigger red wines (Bordeaux varietals, Syrah, etc.) that will age gracefully for 10 years or more.”
My hairdo aside, the red wines from 2016 have been long-lasting and still going strong. I decided to pull a 2016 from the cellar and landed on the Vineland Estates Elevation Bo-Teek Vineyard Cabernet. Here are my thoughts.
Vineland Estates Elevation Bo-Teek Vineyard Cabernet 2016 ($28 at the time) — Sourced from Vineland’s iconic Bo-Teek Vineyard across the road from the winery, butting up to the Tawse Vineyard on the Twenty Mile, this is a blend of 77% Cabernet Franc (winemaker Brian Schmidt’s favourite grape) and 23% Cabernet Sauvignon. It was aged in older/neutral oak barrels for 16 months. It’s quite dark and dense in the glass, showing the ripeness and concentration of the vintage, with a vivid, persistent nose of ripe black cherries, purple plums, brambly raspberries, a touch of cassis, dried tobacco leaf, mulled herbs, forest floor, toasted vanilla bean and rich spice notes. It’s mouth-coating on the palate yet fresh and lively for a decade-old wine, with a smoky, concentrated medley of red berries, black licorice, dried sage, aniseed and herbs with melting tannins, an array of toasty spice notes and a long, lifted finish. Such a beguiling, red blend that only now seems to be coming into harmony. This can easily bring even more pleasure with another decade of aging.
Significant wine events of 2016
as reported by Wines in Niagara
• The Most Thrilling Niagara Red Wine for 2016 was Malivoire’s Courtney Gamay 2013 and the Most Thrilling Niagara White Wine for 2016 was the Hidden Bench Nuit Blanche Rosomel Vineyard 2014.
• Ontario’s Vintner Quality Alliance (VQA) boldly went where few others had gone before and approved regulations governing the production and certification for skin-fermented white Ontario wines, more commonly referred to as “orange” wines.
• Uncorking Niagara history: A rare tasting of 31 bottles of red wines dating back to 1980. A group of us, mainly winemakers and wine writers, gathered up forgotten treasures from the past, a collection of 31 Niagara red wines from the 1980s and 1990s (and one or two from 2000 and 2002), and put them under a microscope. I do not think anyone at this tasting was expecting too much from these fragile and old reds, but my, oh, my, were we in for a surprise. It was history lesson that taught us that the longevity of Niagara wines will surprise many consumers who take the time to cellar the best examples.
• Peter Mielzynski, founder of Hillebrand winery and PMA wine and spirits company, died at age 94. He was a giant in the Canadian beverage industry and a pioneer in the Ontario wine industry. Mielzynski died peacefully on April 7 at Joesph Brant Hospital in Burlington.
• End of the line for Le Clos Jordanne Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays: The brand is dead. An exciting chapter in Canadian winemaking at the highest level, sadly, come to an end with the venerable Le Clos Jordanne brand ceasing to exist as of the current 2012 vintage. Del Rollo, senior director of government relations and estates (at the time) for Constellation Brands (now Arterra), owner of Le Clos Jordanne, confirmed the shocking news to Wines In Niagara. It has since been reinstated and has come back stronger than ever before.
• The Toronto Maple Leafs did not win the Stanley in 2016, marking 48 years since 1967 that they last won it all. As of 2026, they still haven’t even come close, and to be perfectly honest, it’s not looking good for the current season. How’s that for a trend!
A unicorn wine from Icellars
The word “unicorn” gets tossed around a lot, but in this case, it is more than apt. The Red Velvet 2019 from Icellars is a stunner.
This is the first appassimento style wine made from partially dried grapes by Icellars. The late owner and founder of the Niagara-on-the-Lake winery, Adnan Icel, along with consultant Peter Gamble, first revealed this wine to a small circle of tasters, including Tony Aspler and Michael Vaughan, in November of 2021. The wine was packaged in a show stopping, painted black bottle with wax dipped topper and a striking red label all contained in a red velvet bag. The wine we tried was only two days out from bottling and it wasn’t really fair to fully review the wine. Zoom ahead to 2026, and Icellars was kind enough to send a bottle over to taste after five years of aging.
It’s a blend of 67% Cabernet Sauvignon (the dried part) with Malbec and Merlot that saw 24 months of oak aging in new, one-year-old and two-year-old barrels.
The Cab Sauv grapes were picked on Dec. 7, 2019, long after a lot of the icewine grapes were harvested that year in Niagara and what Adnan called the “latest picking day in the Northern hemisphere” for Cabernet Sauvignon.
“Cab Sauv grapes went through a few freeze and thaw cycles before picking,” he told me later. “And, if I am not wrong, there was an official icewine picking window on Nov. 21 or so. This happened for the first time for us (maybe for other wineries too). It was the first time we picked red wine grapes after an official icewine picking day. So, the unique taste and flavour of the 2019 Red Velvet is coming from this very rare event.”
The Brix at picking were 23.7 and after the grapes naturally dried inside the retail facility, “to our surprise” it reached 33 Brix in only 14 days. “We had 1,000 kg of fresh grapes and after drying we had 430 kg of grapes to process. The original alcohol was around 18% before the Malbec and Merlot were blended a year later.” The alcohol ended up being 15.8% with the sugar at a surprisingly dry 2.5 g/l.
Here is my updated note on this extraordinary wine.
Icellars Red Velvet 2019 ($125, sold out) — This was perhaps the most unique Niagara wine I had ever tasted when I first tried it in 2021; there was nothing to compare it to. When originally tasted, it was only bottled two days before and unfair to really review this seriously or score it. But now I can fully review the wine now after tasting it a week or so ago. It has an enthralling nose that starts with a decadent, heady essence of sandalwood perfume followed by cherry licorice, Damson plums, compoted raspberries, black currant jam, kirsch, Sultana raisins, anise, sweet spice notes and minty, integrated herbs. It is super concentrated and ripe on the palate yet approachable and poised from the velvety smooth tannins that all leads to layers of compoted red and dark berries, kirsch, eucalypt, plums, raisiny notes, some smoky/cedar accents, elevated oak spices, toasted vanilla bean and a long finish that dances lightly on the tongue. It comes at you in layer after layer and lingers for minutes. It is an exceptional wine with another 10-15 years of aging potential, if you can wait that long.
Niagara wines coming to
Vintages stores on Saturday
Our two recommendations from the Niagara wines being released at Vintages on Saturday will provide Pinot Noir fans an opportunity to taste Twenty Mile Bench Pinot Noirs side by side from different vintages by two of the best producers of Burgundian varieties in the region. Here’s what I liked.
Bachelder Les Villages Bench Pinot Noir 2023 ($35, 91 points) — The Les Villages Pinot Noir is from the Niagara Escarpment regional appellation — which Thomas Bachelder calls “The Bench.” It has a chiselled nose of brambly raspberries, Morello cherries, red currants, rose petals and integrated spice notes. It’s silky smooth on the palate and shows an integrated melange of ripe red berries, brambly/earthy notes, a touch of anise with a mouth-watering acidity and a long finish. Can cellar through 2030.
Cloudsley Cellars Twenty Mile Bench Pinot Noir 2021 ($37, 91 points) — The vineyard blend for the 2021 Twenty Mile Bench Pinot is 47% Parke, 28% Hanck, 12.5% Glen Elgin, and 12.5% End of the Road. Aging was in French oak (20% new) for 18 months. All the 2021 Pinots show a lighter shade of red in the glass due to the wet vintage, but the aromas and taste are not impacted by the colour. This has a lifted nose of ripe raspberries, dark cherries, pomegranate, red currants and spices. It shows a melange of red berries on the palate with some anise, savoury notes, smooth tannins, oak spice and a tangy, finessed finish. Can cellar through 2030.
Also released, but not reviewed by Wines in Niagara:
• Ravine Charmat Sparkling ($25)
• Lakeview Cabernet Franc Icewine 2022 ($35 for 200 mL)
• Magnotta Limited Edition Riesling Icewine 2023 ($50 for 375 mL)
• Divergence Creek Road Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc 2023 ($25)
• Kacaba Reserve Riesling 2023 ($24)
• Leaning Post The Fifty Chardonnay 2023 ($27)
• 13th Street Merlot 2023 ($22)
• Kew Soldier’s Grant 2023 ($25)
• Lakeview Cabernet Franc 2020 ($25)
• Leaning Post Cuvée Winona 2022 ($29)
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