Tidings Magazine

What you might ask, could possibly be so different about an Icewine tasting? A few wines, a dialogue leading you through one liquid icon, towards those unique and then aged. Everyone sufficiently impressed — the wines depleted — end of another spectacular evening.

It was instead, a night of delightfully shattered expectations. The venue was the age-worn loft at Inniskillin Wines, the speaker was the bubbly Shari Darling, the subject was her brand new Icewine aroma wheel and she was brazen enough to teach a group of seasoned wine tasters just how it’s done.

One visit and you’ll be entranced. A complex and richly compelling country, Argentina defies easy analysis. Wine, though, plays a huge role in defining the nation’s culture.

Only recently overtaken by the United States, Argentina stood as the fifth largest wine producer in the world — imagine that. And the wines were rarely seen outside the country. The main reason for this is that Argentines just drank it all themselves. Buenos Aires, which translates as “good winds,” numbers some twelve million inhabitants — known to the rest of their countrymen as Porteños, meaning “from the port” — and they’re all clearly thirsty.

The culture of the city and most of southern Argentina is almost entirely European, with Spanish and Italian immigrants everywhere. And these ordinary folk brought the vines of their homelands with them. Far more than anywhere in the New World, wine became the everyday beverage of the people. Local wines were consumed in copious quantities and for the most part, quality took second place to quantity.

“And I sacrificed a goat to St Urbain, the Patron Saint of Wineries.” 

Daniel Speck, owner of Henry of Pelham Winery

Keeping ones sense of humour in light of adversity is always sound judgment. Certainly Daniel’s levity underlines a serious concern for the Ontario wine industry — two years running which saw vines damaged by frosty temperatures dipping below the -20˚C mark. The disagreeable conditions led to reduced crops in table wines, but more importantly Icewine, for both 2003 and 2005.

I’m new to wine and am still having trouble coming to grips with what tannins are and where they come from. Can you help?

Though I wasn’t much of a chemistry student (too much time spent with a calculator and not enough with a Bunsen burner), tannins are pretty straightforward. If you’ve ever taken a sip of over-steeped tea or twisted the stem off an apple with your teeth and felt that astringent, bitter impression on your palate, you’re already well on your way to a doctorate in tannins.

Tannins are natural chemical compounds found in the skins, seeds and, yes, stems of fruit and in other organic materials like tree bark and tea leaves. Though white wines rarely come into contact with tannin-carrying compounds during their making, the juice for red wines is exposed to the grape skins for extended periods of time (that’s where the colour comes from, kids) and, during pressing, to the seeds and stems.

Wine tastings are a dime a dozen but one of the hottest tickets around is the Banée of Oliver. At this annual winery-only banquet, southern Okanagan producers gather for a convivial evening of swapping stories and tasting not just each others’ wines but bottles from around the world.

It seems only fitting that the country producing both the greatest quantity and the greatest variety of wine in the world should also host the globe’s largest wine show. Over 4,000 wineries and 100,000 wine lovers gathered in the literary home of Romeo and Juliet for an event that is frequently billed as “another love story in Verona.”

Primarily a showcase for Italian producers, the five-day April extravaganza could be expanded to last a whole month and it still would not be enough time for the avid wine geek to experience the multiplicity of varietals and wine styles this regionally diverse country has to offer.