Tawse and redstone wineries
In 2005, Burgundy-loving financier Moray Tawse opened his eponymous Niagara benchland winery, complete with gravity-flow design, geothermal system and a wetland bio-filter. He opened Redstone, a stone’s throw away, in 2015. Both are certified organic and biodynamic.
WHAT’S THE FIRST THING most people ask about organic wines? Do they taste different?
I put the question to winemaker Paul Pender, who has worked as winemaker at Tawse since its inception and is now director of viticulture and winemaking. Pender smiles. “I don’t know,” he concedes, “but Moray often says there must be something about our single-vineyard wines that makes them stand out among hundreds of others in blind-tasting competitions.” That’s why Tawse has won the National Wine Awards Winery of the Year no less than four times in the last eight years. And in 2017 the winner was Redstone, Moray Tawse’s other organic, biodynamic Niagara property.
Biodynamic farming was invented in the 1920s by the Austrian scientist and philosopher Rudolf Steiner. In a series of lectures, he proposed maximizing the health and fertility of the land by applying specific compost preparations according to a calendar determined by the planets and moon. Some of these methods sound a tad arcane—one preparation is buried in a cow’s horn for the winter; another is hung inside a stag’s bladder, and channelling cosmic energy is also part of the process—but a number of the world’s top producers take them totally seriously, among them Zind Humbrecht and Opus One. “So do most of the great estates in Burgundy, including Domaine de la Romanée-Conti,” says Paul Pender, “so it’s more a matter of why not do it! I don’t see it as magic or anything. It’s just one more little bit of attention you give your vineyards. The preparations are basically incubators for microbes—compost accelerators for your soil that break down nitrogen and minerals and make them available to the plant.” In other words, they boost the life in the soil and in doing so enhance the sense of terroir in the finished wine.