Decanting Niagara: A sense of place
It’s that time of year. We’re in the thick of winter and many of us are daydreaming of escaping somewhere.
I teach about some of the most beautiful areas in the world, and I often think about how much of those places work their way into the bottle.
Imagine opening a bottle of Champagne and literally smelling the aromas that come from those deep, underground caves. Well, it happens.
Having a ‘sense of place’ in a wine is not a novel idea, but it’s something we don’t necessarily consciously think about enough.
Wine is such an agriculturalbased product. Grapes grow in certain areas, and due to their “terroir” (the geographic and climatic conditions surrounding the grapes), they will taste different from grapes from different terroirs.
For example, if you had a vineyard across the road from mine, and your terroir was slightly different, our grapes (even if we both grew the same Chardonnay clone and fermented it under the same conditions) would make different tasting wines. Perhaps the unique slope in your vineyard allowed for more drainage, different angles of sunlight ripened your grapes more, and your limestone soil provided more flinty flavour.
Many European countries are obsessed with this idea of terroir, your wine tasting like where it came from, that they classify quality based on it, and use it to guide bottle labelling.
Have you ever looked for a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc in the France section of the LCBO? Not seeing the grape name on the bottle anywhere? Odd names like Pouilly Fumé and Sancerre staring back at you? Well, they’re both Sauvignon Blanc.
However in countries like France, wineries label their wine based on the terroir (ie. Pouilly Fumé, the beautiful region in the Loire Valley), rather than the grape type. For them, arguably, it’s more important that you’re tasting the uniqueness of this area rather than choosing wine by grape variety. And they have a point. The taste of a Pouilly Fumé will always have that gunpowder-scented nose that I don’t find in any other Sauvignon Blancs.
However wine isn’t the only beverage that provides this “taste of home.”
In the beer world, water plays a vital role. Water is one of the four basic ingredients in brewing. The water type you use is significant, as its chemical makeup will affect the final flavour in the beer.
For example, if you used the same recipe to make a pilsner in its ancestral home of Pilsen, Czech Republic (where the water is very soft), and then in Dublin, Ireland, you would end up with different tasting pilsners. This is because the water in Dublin has a high alkalinity, much better suited for darker beers like stouts and porters. Therefore if breweries try to recreate the classic pilsner anywhere else in the world, they’d have to accept that it will never taste exactly “like home” unless they alter the mineral content of the water.
This finally explains why I still can’t find a Guinness that tastes as heavenly as it did when I was in Ireland.
The world of spirits also connect to a sense of place.
In Scotland you’ll find an array of single malt scotches that are branded by location - Islay, Speyside, Highland, etc. Many distillers will talk about the distinguishing terroir their barley grows in, as well as the water supply they use when distilling. All local and therefore all a sense of place.
If you taste a scotch from Islay, where distilleries are often located on the turbulent shores of the North Atlantic, you can smell a salt water aroma in the glass and a light seaweed flavour comes out on the finish. This is largely because while the scotch spends all those years aging in barrels, they’re in warehouses at the mercy of the strong, salty winds and the crashing ocean that lives beside them. Those flavours make their way into the final product.
What if you want a taste of our home?
Many Niagara wineries are fermenting with wild, local yeasts, and a Riesling that comes from the Beamsville Bench versus a Riesling that comes from the shores of Niagara-on-the-Lake will taste very different due to their specific terroirs.
Some local breweries are starting to experiment with local yeasts as well, and are even growing their own hops.
Spirit lovers need look no further than Dillon’s Distillery. Their rye whisky is made from 100 per cent local Ontario ingredients (solely with rye grain - surprisingly rare for most Canadian ryes, so it’s the real deal), and was aged in Canadian oak barrels.
So get out of hibernation mode and explore our local wineries, breweries and distilleries and discover a taste of home. After all, there’s no place like it.