Cabernet Sauvignon Ice Wine - Niagara Peninsula, Canada

Cabernet Sauvignon is almost certainly the most well known red wine grape on earth which ordinarily would fall well out of bounds for a site focused on unusual wines.  Part of what makes a wine unusual for me, though, is the style that it is made in, and today's wine definitely fits the bill for unusual styles.  The wine that I'd like to take a look at today is an ice wine made from Cabernet Sauvignon, which certainly isn't all that common, but the more I thought about it, the more I started to realize that wines made from Cabernet Sauvignon in general fall into a very narrow range of styles.  This is true of a lot of wine grapes, but seems to be especially true of Cabernet Sauvignon.  The range of styles available for a given wine made from a given grape are generally much wider than most people realize, but with the exception of grapes like Pinot Noir or Chardonnay, most of the great wine grapes of the world are made into a very limited number of styles.  Why might that be?.

Let's stick with the example of Cabernet Sauvignon, which tends to be made into big, powerful red wines everywhere it is grown, though the possibility certainly exists for it to be made into sparkling wine, white wine or even dessert wine.  The reason wines from this grape (and most other grapes you can think of) tend to be made in the same style all over the world is probably two-fold.  On the production side of things, Cabernet Sauvignon has been grown for centuries and over that time period, people figured out that to make Cabernet Sauvignon into the best wine possible, it really needed to be treated a certain way and made into a certain kind of wine.  You can make sparkling wine from Cabernet Sauvignon, but the best example you can make in that style is never going to be as good as the best still red wine made from those same grapes.  Grapes have certain characteristics that make them good for some application and not so good for others and, over time, producers have recognized these characteristics and have found the best ways to accent the positive while downplaying the negative.

The other part of the equation involves the consumer.  Wine makers aren't able to determine which styles of wine best fit an individual grape without some idea of who is ultimately going to be drinking the wine.  Let's imagine four different wineries putting four wines (one from each winery) made from Cabernet Sauvignon on the shelf, one as a still white wine, one as a sparkling wine, one as a fortified wine and one as a regular red wine.  If the winery making the still red wine sells out of their wine right away while the other wineries struggle to sell theirs, you can bet that by the time the next harvest rolls around, the other three wineries will devote at least some of their efforts to making a wine like the one that everybody wanted to buy.  Pretty soon all of the wineries are copying this style and the market is flooded with still red wine and few other styles for this one grape.  Consumers try wines made from the same grape but from different wineries in different regions that are all stylistically very similar, and they eventually come to identify this style with the grape itself.  The consumer then has a certain kind of expectation about a wine made from Cabernet Sauvignon and many are resistant to variations on that one style.

Which isn't to say that I think any of this is a bad thing.  The collective wisdom of centuries of wine making and wine drinking has generally not led us astray.  The great wines of the world are typically those that fit into these kinds of molds or conform to these kinds of standards.  Fortunately, though, this collective wisdom doesn't equate into dogma and even in places where the lawmakers limit the available possibilities for winemakers by dictating varieties and styles, there are ways to circumvent these regulations.  There are still winemakers who will poke at traditions and perform experiments and there are still wine drinkers who will indulge and even revel in these breaks from the norm and as long as these things continue to happen, I should have enough material to keep this blog alive for a long time.

As mentioned above, today's wine is an ice wine, which is a style that is definitely limited by a winemaker's geography.  In order for a wine to be a true ice wine, the grapes must be picked from the vine and then pressed while they are naturally frozen.  As you might imagine, this isn't possible in some of the warmer areas of the world, but maybe not for the reason you'd think.  Let's think about a hot place like Spain, where I'm pretty sure nobody is actually making ice wine.  You might think that ice wine isn't possible in Spain because it doesn't get cold enough for the grapes to freeze, but that's not necessarily true.  The temperature does drop below freezing occasionally in warm climates, but the problem with making ice wine in Spain is that by the time the climate gets cold enough to freeze, the grapes are way overripe and have probably either rotted, raisined or fallen completely off the vine.  Their growing is season is very hot, so the grapes ripen very quickly and reach their peak ripeness well before the temperature gets cold enough for them to freeze.  In places at more extreme latitudes, the growing season is less warm overall and the grapes ripen much more slowly so that by the time it gets cold enough to cause grapes to freeze, these grapes are closer to being ripe and have maintained much more of their acidity than their counterparts in warmer parts of the world.

Today's wine is from the Niagara Peninsula of Canada, which is just over the border from Buffalo, NY.  This is southern by Canadian standards and the climate here is moderated a bit by Lake Erie and Lake Ontario which border it to the south and north respectively, so while it's warmer than say the Yukon territory, it's still pretty cool by wine-growing region standards.  There is table wine production here, mostly from Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, but the region's best known export is probably their ice wines.  Most ice wines are made from high-acid white grapes like Riesling or Vidal Blanc, but there are some red ice wines made as well.  I have occasionally come across some ice wines made from Cabernet Franc, but I had never seen one made from Cabernet Sauvignon grapes until this one.

The wine I tried was a 200 mL bottle of the 2006 Lakeview Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon ice wine.  I received this as a gift from a family member who was in Canada a few months back (retail on this website is around $11).  In the glass this wine was a fairly light tawny color that had a kind of purple-brown hue to it.  The nose was moderately intense and fruity with aromas of strawberry jam, figs, raisins and dried strawberries.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with very high acidity.  It was very sweet with flavors of freeze-dried strawberries, black raspberries, tart cherries, and raisins.  It was light and berryish overall with a lot of red fruits and dried fruits.  It was bright and zippy, which is an excellent quality in a wine this sweet, as it provided a very nice kind of balance.  I would imagine that these icewines are the winery's "Plan B" for those years where the growing season isn't warm enough to ripen these Cabernet grapes completely.  It's definitely a side of this grape that you don't get to see that often, and I found it very interesting and enjoyable.

Baco Noir - Ontario, Canada

Today marks Fringe Wine's first foray into the Great White North, better known to most as the nation of Canada.  While Canada's wine making history can be traced back to the early 19th century, finding wines from Canada that aren't ice wines can be a difficult task, even here in Massachusetts which is only a few hours from the Canadian border.  Canadian wines are apparently somewhat tough to find even in Canada, as they hold less than a 50% market share of all wines sold within Canada (meaning that over half of all wines in Canada are from somewhere else in the world, which is a rare feat among wine-producing nations).  I was able to find today's wine, made from Baco Noir grapes, in a shop in the Boston area, but before telling you about that wine and the Baco Noir grape, I'd like to talk a little bit about the history of the Canadian wine industry.

Much of the vineyard land in Canada is located in the southern part of the country, typically around large bodies of water that help to moderate drastic temperature shifts and which can also soften the edges of a harsh winter.  Somewhat surprisingly, most Canadian vineyards are located at a latitude similar to that of Languedoc in southern France or Chianti in Italy.  Furthermore, in some of Canada's wine growing regions, the summer temperatures are higher on the average than those in Bordeaux or Burgundy.  While these facts may seem to add up to a warm growing region, the fact of the matter is that because the summers are so much shorter and because the winters are so much harsher, Canada's vineyards cannot support the same warm weather grapes as their latitudinal counterparts across the pond.

The first cultivated vineyard in Canada was a 20 acre plot devoted to local labrusca vines.  From about 1811 through 1916, most of the vineyards in Canada were planted either to various native vine species or to cold-hardy hybrids.  1916 could have sounded a catastrophic death-knell to Canada's young and scattered wine industry as the Canadian government enacted their own form of prohibition, four years before the United States would do the same.  Curiously, grape growers in Canada were able to lobby that wine be excluded from the general prohibition on alcohol, so rather than suffer the profound setbacks that the United States wine industry endured as a result of this legislation, the Canadian wine industry was able to flourish and expand.  Canadian prohibition was repealed in 1927 (six years before the 21st amendment repealing prohibition was passed in the US), and in the eleven year span of its existence, nearly 60 winery licenses were granted just in the province of Ontario.

The ending of prohibition in Canada was damnation in disguise, though, as at around the same time prohibition was repealed, the Canadian government enacted legislation that created large government controlled monopolies within each province which were responsible for the sale and distribution of all alcoholic beverages.  A freeze was also put on granting winery licenses, and no licenses were given for new wineries from 1927 until 1974, when the Inniskillin winery was given its commercial license.  During this 50 year span, though, the wine industry was essentially handcuffed, as expansion and experimentation were very difficult, if not impossible, within the confines of this system.  Most of the wines produced were sweet and foxy and quite a few of them were fortified to boot, while most of the vineyards were still planted to native grape varieties and hybrids.

A series of events around 1988 led to the establishment of what might be called the modern Canadian winemaking industry.  The first was the enactment of a free trade agreement with the United States in 1987 which removed many trade restrictions between these two nations and allowed for greater movement of consumer goods between them.  The second was the creation of the Vintners Quality Alliance (VQA), which established the framework for an appellation system in Canada as well as minimum quality standards for wines that would carry the VQA seal (this exists only in Ontario and British Columbia with subtle differences in each locale).  The final act was the initiation of a vine-pull program that had the Canadian government partially subsidizing and incentivizing growers to pull up their native vine species and hybrids and replace them with higher quality vines.  While this has certainly led to an increase in the plantings of European vinifera vines, there are still a lot of native and hybrid species, especially in some of the more climactically extreme regions of the country (though labrusca species are specifically banned from inclusion in any VQA wines, no such ban exists on hybrids or on wines produced outside the purview of the VQA).

One of the more popular and well regarded of the hybrid vines in Canada is Baco Noir.  Baco Noir was created by a Frenchman named François Baco either in the 1890's or early 1900's.  Baco was one of the great French hybridizers (like Albert Seidel, Johannes Seyve or Pierre Landot) who was active around the turn of the 20th Century.  Baco's crowning achievement was actually a grape called Baco Blanc, which was used primarily as the base for Armagnac until the 1970's.  Folle Blanche had been the primary Armagnac grape until phylloxera came along and decimated the plantings in this area.  Folle Blanche didn't take well to the phylloxera cure of grafting onto American rootstocks, and so Baco Blanc, a crossing of Folle Blanche and a native American grape called Noah, became the preferred variety in the area.  It has since been supplanted by Ugni Blanc, but there are still over 5,000 acres planted to it in the area, though that number is decreasing rapidly.

Baco Noir is also an offspring of Folle Blanche, but its other parent is an unknown Vitis riparia vine.  It was itself once widely planted in some areas of France, but is hardly found there anymore.  It was introduced into the United States in 1951 and in Canada a few years later in 1955.  It is relatively widespread throughout the midwestern, northeastern and mid-Atlantic regions of the US as well as in eastern Canada.  It is fairly cold hardy, though it does have a relatively early bud-break which can be a problem in areas that are prone to late spring frosts.  It does have a problem with vigor and needs to be aggressively pruned on light, fertile soils, but is typically fine on heavier, poorer soils.  It is a fairly low yielder that is susceptible to a few different fungal diseases and is apparently very attractive to birds.

I was able to find a bottle of the 2005 Henry of Pelham Baco Noir from Ontario for about $18 from my friends at Curtis Liquors.  In the glass the wine was a fairly deep brickish garnet color with a brick red rim.  The nose was intense with spicy black plum and black cherry fruit along with some baking spice, bitter chocolate and cocoa powder.  On the palate the wine was full bodied with fairly high acidity and medium tannins.  There were flavors of cocoa, black plum, black cherry, dried cherry, baking spice and black pepper, with a hint of tart cherry popping up on the finish.  This wine was much deeper and richer than some of the other red hybrids I've reviewed (like Chambourcin, St Croix, Vincent, Marechal Foch and Landot Noir), but it did still have that tart red berry fruit at its core.  It is a tasty wine and represents a pretty good value at less than $20 a bottle.  I would definitely recommend grabbing a bottle if you run across it and serving it with a richly marbled grilled steak.