(Re-Tasted January 2014) ... Hot-diggity, one of my favourite Ontario grape varietals from a winery that knows how to handle the grape and does it well; and now with 9 years of aging it's time to see just how this wine is doing. Back in 2008 I gushed over this wine and thought decanting would help smooth it out. I put the wine into a box and forgot about it for awhile, seems I forgot about it for a good long while ... 6 years to be exact ... now I'm excited to give it a try.
Upon opening there were aromas of white and black peppercorns, in fact they seem to take over the wine; palate was full of tobacco, dried black raspberry, and spice - but what really stood out were some fairly aggressive tannins that came on mid-palate right to the finish; but as I like to say, if you were locked in a bottle for 9 years you'd come out pretty grumpy too - and this wine was just that. After about 20 minutes the aggression started to subside; I then tried using my VinoAir to see what that did, but is striped all the character out of the wine ... so I went back to a free pour into the glass straight from the bottle. Within 40 minutes it had become a bottle you'd like to take to dinner with touches of licorice and white pepper en-robing that dried fruit and the tannins too on a more subservient role, smoothing out beautifully. This wine is ready to drink right now and it's very enjoyable. In a word, it was delicious and well worth the wait. Now I wish I had more of it ... ain't that always the way.
