Northern Lights

The future looks challenging for some winemakers but others are just hitting their stride—particularly those in Canada and Europe’s far north.

Our resident wine critic Sarah Heller recommends her favourite cold climate wines

As the cooler weather finally starts to arrive, we have only one word to describe the summer: hot, and not in a good way. Though the region’s sultry heat was punishing, we can only imagine the suffering of our northern hemisphere winemaker friends, who battled a historically hot July.

True, warming temperatures over the past few decades have yielded an unprecedented string of great vintages of barolo, red burgundy (arguably fewer white) and German riesling, with winemakers consistently achieving ripeness unthinkable in the middle of the 20th century. However, more warming probably isn’t better and we seem to be pushing past the sweet spot into a world of chaotic weather with quality-wrecking temperature extremes.

Though poor vine growers can’t simply pick up their vines and move, as consumers we have the luxury of being able to turn our sights northward to cooler latitudes. Luckily, towards the north of and even beyond the 30º-50º band historically favoured for vine growing, lie a number of regions just hitting their stride.

CANADA

Though hardly that far north in European terms—the Okanagan Valley lies about 50º and Niagara-on-the-lake about 43º—canada’s wine regions were once of nearexclusive interest to ice wine drinkers, but now have an increasing bounty to offer dry and sparkling wine fans as well.

However, wines from the two key provinces of British Columbia and Ontario differ significantly. The extreme continentality and unexpectedly warm, dry climate of BC’S Okanagan tend to produce generous, plush-fruited chardonnays, bordeaux blends and pinot noirs that could be confused for slightly dialled-back California wines. Meanwhile, temperatures in Ontario’s Niagaraon-the-lake and Niagara Escarpment are stabilised by their proximity to Lake Ontario and are generally lower, consistently producing lean, chiselled sparkling wines and tense, mineral expressions of chardonnay, pinot noir, riesling and, trendy, chinon-like cabernet franc.

ENGLAND

As any avid royal wedding watcher will tell you, English sparkling wine is having a moment. Perhaps soon to be separated from the French region to the south with which many (though not all) English wine regions share their chalky subsoil—along with their winemaking method and grape variety blend—uk winemakers are delving deeper into regionality, with Sussex having earned its own appellation. They will have a lot more material to play with soon, with the UK’S land under vine having roughly trebled since 2000 and about a million vines being planted in 2017 alone.

Once fairly easily identifiable by their ‘sherbet’ fruit flavours and a dearth of the toasty, cedary characters we love in traditional method sparklers, English fizz is starting to take on encouraging levels of polish, particularly as more producers develop prestige bottlings. Though not yet launched, pioneering Nyetimber’s rosé and white cuvées called 1086— referring to the year the ‘Nitimbreha’ estate was mentioned in the Domesday Book—are made using a selection of their estate-grown West Sussex fruit, and promise to be English sparkling benchmarks.

SCANDINAVIA

Though we’ve been hearing about vineyards in

Sweden, Denmark and even Norway for several years, we had yet to actually taste any of the wine until recently. Production in the Scandis is mostly based on cold-hardy grapes like the sci-fi-sounding solaris, which is resistant to both frost and fungal diseases, and has a relatively full body and low acidity (helpful in a marginal, cold climate).

Demonstrating a Viking-like proclivity for risk, such producers as Denmark’s Vexebo have pushed the envelope further by embracing natural winemaking and organics, only achieving painfully low yields of 10 hectolitres per hectare (compared to about 50hl/ha for classic bordeaux). However, having won favour with red-hot Copenhagen restaurants like

Noma, Kadeau and Relae has allowed them to make a go of it.