Kudos to Creek
Like many other trades, most winemakers get to where they are by learning from colleagues who have “been there and done that” many times before. I am no exception. I’ve been extremely lucky through the years to learn what I know from two of the best in the Ontario wine business.
Rob Power and Craig MacDonald have won so many awards for Creekside Estate Winery that I’m beginning to lose count. They are obviously skilled craftsmen in the cellar, but what I admire most in these two is their genuine nature, patience and teaching ability. In fact, it is no surprise to me when I open the St. Catharines Standard to read that they had captured four more trophies at Cuveé 2009. They’ve managed to surround themselves with an excellent winemaking team, who would think nothing of bogging out the nastiest of red fermenters at their behest. Now that’s loyalty!
Ever since our initial handshake agreement with Owner Peter Jensen in 1999, my parents and I have felt pride supplying grapes to Creekside and watching as Rob and Craig crafted one great wine after another. As original Creekside grape growers, our fortunes have been tied to theirs for ten years now, and we wouldn’t have been able to start our winery without their continuing help.
It is even sweeter to note that their latest wins at Cuveé really demonstrate the potential for the St. David’s Bench Appellation. All four winning wines contained a majority of fruit sourced at vineyards located in St. Davids. The terroir and micro-climate of this small area really helps ripen later varietals like Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon and Viognier. These wines tend to be distinctly full-bodied with great structure and ageing potential. Ravine Vineyard and Coyote’s Run are two other exciting wineries that are showcasing the best St. David’s Bench has to offer.
Good on ya, boys!
Five Rows Website Launch
Today marks the next phase in our winery development. We have officially launched our Five Rows website at www.fiverows.com. This will be the hub of our winery operation. From this site you will be able to access my latest blog entries and also get info on all of current and upcoming releases. Excitingly, there is a page specifically designed to keep us connected with all those who have supported us through wine purchases. All customers are encouraged to record their name and bottle number on this page along with an optional comment on the wine or a story behind their connection to Five Rows.
We’ve received many inquiries as to where you can find our wines, so now the website will keep you posted to that end. You will also find a link to our Lowrey Vineyards site, a future showcase for the viticultural side of our operation.
Pondering a Release Date
Now that pruning is in full swing and somewhat under control, I finally have some time to devote to tying up a few loose ends in the winery. One of the challenges of sustaining a vineyard and winery operation of this size (ie. no other employees) is deciding which “hat” to wear on a daily basis. Luckily, my cellar work is fairly minimal at this time of year, with a main focus on protein and cold stabilization in the 2008 whites. I like to use bentonite to obtain protein stability, at a minimal rate, so as not to upset the delicate nature of these aromatic wines. Fining with too much bento can actually have the negative effect of binding and stripping flavour compounds as well as unwanted proteins.
Another important consideration at this time of year is to assess the entire inventory in an attempt to come up with a bottling and release plan for the coming season. Needless to say, this is a daunting task! At the completion of this all-encompassing tasting session, a couple of things became abundantly clear. The first being that the 2008 vintage is a lot more promising than many people touted at the outset, and the second is that our 2007 reds are not quite ready to unleash on the public. These wines are so youthful and intense that further time in barrel is a must in my opinion. From a winery sales perspective this creates a bit of a conundrum. Initially, my intention was to bottle these wines sometime early next summer and have them ready for the fall of 2009, but now I’m leaning towards pushing those dates back. I truly feel that it would be a disservice to these wines to release them prematurely, just to meet budgetary demands.
I’m of the opinion that for Niagara to make the next step on the world stage, we have to make a concerted effort to demonstrate the ageability of our premium wines. The temptation and current trend is to release wines too early, mainly out of cash flow necessity. It is my hope that doing things on a smaller scale will afford us the opportunity to wait for the right time to release, without too much disruption in our business plan. That is the precise reason we decided to make small lots of Cabernet Sauvignon in 2004 and 2005 – to buy time for this kind of scenario.
The good news is that the 2007’s have a chance to be something very special, and lets hope there are enough of them around at the peak of their existence to prove Niagara can age some great wines.
Label Announcement
The labels are in! After signing a final draft approval and some weeks of nervous anticipation, I felt like a kid at Christmas as I ripped open a box to reveal the culmination of nearly a year’s worth of brainstorming, planning and tough decisions. I couldn’t be more proud of the works of art that I found in that box, and all the credit goes to the highly skilled and dedicated team at Insite Design. They took an initial concept and managed to translate it into a beautiful and original label that I truly feel represents my family’s vision for the journey we are about to embark upon. I always felt that the reality of starting this winery wouldn’t hit me until I saw that first bottle with a label on it, and I can now fully attest to that.
Through carefully writing in the required info and applying each label by hand, I feel a neat personal connection to every bottle. Notwithstanding a few crookedly applied labels, I’m thrilled about this prospect and intend to continue doing so as long as I can.
After “borrowing” my parents’ old kitchen table, we now have a space in our barn that is set aside for guest tastings, and I encourage anyone interested to contact us and set up a time. It is my intention to personally conduct all tastings and give our guests a peek into future vintages as well. All those who support us through wine purchases during this initial phase will be rewarded by always getting first choice when it comes to future limited releases.
Available wines include our 2004 Cabernet Sauvignon ($300 per 6-bottle case), 2007 Pinot Gris and 2007 Sauvignon Blanc (both $150 per 6-bottle case). Descriptions of all these wines can be found in previous blog entries.
Longing for the Beauty of Fall
With some extremely cold days bearing down on us later this week, I can’t help but find myself nostalgic for a beautiful fall day. I hearken back to the memorable November day when we wrapped up our 2008 harvest by hand-picking some very ripe Cabernet Sauvignon. The end of harvest is always kind of bittersweet because it represents a time when, thankfully, the stress is gone, but so is the fast-paced, daily excitement and a bond to something you’ve tended with care all season.
I remember that day on many levels. The crisp aromas in the fall air, the wonderfully rich colours filling the escarpment, the small dark clusters of Cabernet, lugging picking baskets onto the wagon knowing that I was going to pay for it the next day, worrying that I might not have enough bin space to accommodate both rows of grapes, then forgetting all my worries listening to a Fleet Foxes song on my iPod….ahh to be back just for a moment! As I rode back to the barn with this last load, I remember thinking that I must be the luckiest guy on earth to be able to do something I love surrounded by nature, family and friends.
The Terroir of St. Davids Bench
The friendly little town of St. David’s was a great place to grow up. Family members lived around every corner, and the public school playground was within walking distance. Grandma Lowrey’s house was always a hub of activity after school, as my cousins and I feasted on cookies and went exploring around the farm until our parents got off work. Little did we know that the dirt we came home covered in would one day be heralded for “uniquely expressing regional wine character”.
“Terroir”, the French word for “soil”, means many things to many people, and has evolved into an all-encompassing term. I like to think of it as the combination of environmental, biochemical and geological factors that influence both the fruit of a growing grapevine and the resultant wine. It’s the “je ne sais quoi” behind many of the world’s greatest wines. That part of the wine that is seemingly out of our control and expressed in its unique taste, aroma and texture. The cool thing is that single varietal wines crafted from the same vineyard terroir tend to produce similar characteristics year after year.
We are located in the VQA Ontario “St. David’s Bench” Appellation. I’m not sure whether my Great, Great Grandfather was aware of all the potential “vinifera-growing” benefits of this site when settling here, but he did have a keen intuition for which fruit crops to plant back in his day. I’ll spare you the geology lesson, but the Bench and Niagara Escarpment combine to provide excellent air circulation, drainage, and groundwater supply. The ancient shores of glacial Lake Iroquois have left our vineyard with soils that range from sandy loam to clay loam and hard clay. Limestone deposits are also abundant, helping to add to the overall mineral complexity.
Looking back at some newspaper clippings of wines made from our Pinot Noir over the years, I was amazed to see the similarities in flavour descriptors used by the reviewers. In 1993, the Inniskillin Alliance Pinot Noir was described as having flavours of “candied cherry, raspberry, anise, earth, pepper, vanilla and firm tannin”. The 1999 Creekside Pinot showed “raspberry, violets and a touch of pepper” and the 2001 Creekside Pinot featured “cherry, beet root and smoky notes”. Our 2007 Pinot Noir is in its infancy right now, but the preceding characteristics could aptly describe this wine as well. I take no credit for this…chalk it up to the terroir.
Our First Review! : Check out the “Last Drop” column of the Jan/Feb edition of Vines Magazine (seen above) for a review of our 2004 Cabernet Sauvignon.
Five Rows Launch
With great excitement we are pleased to announce that our long journey to a finished product is finally nearing completion. Our first wines have passed VQA sensory and lab evaluations, and the labels have gone to press. We are now accepting orders for our Five Rows 2004 Cabernet Sauvignon, 2007 Pinot Gris and 2007 Sauvignon Blanc. These wines will all be available in special 6-bottle case allotments, with red wines retailing for $300/case and whites $150/case. We hope to have a short run of labels in hand soon, however getting labeled wines to customers pre-Christmas might prove to be a little challenging. I assure we will do our best to get orders out as expediently as possible, even if it means fashioning some temporary labels with markers and duct tape. Please call us at 905-262-5113 or email wes@fiverows.com with any orders or queries.
2007 Five Rows Sauvignon Blanc
Like other varietals in the Lowrey Vineyard, my parents planted Sauvignon Blanc Clone 297 in separate years and in varying soil profiles to help add complexity to Creekside Estate Winery’s portfolio of wines. Clone 297 has proven to be anything but “farmer-friendly” with a weird combination of extremely low winter hardiness and eye-popping vine vigour. However, when the winter co-operates and the vines are tended aggressively – great wines can be achieved. 2007 was that Vintage. Older French Oak barrels (2003 & 2005 Berthomieu) were used to ferment this Sauvignon Blanc. Following treatment with a pectinase enzyme, one barrel was fermented wild and the other with BA11. The yeast mix seemed to pull different aromatics and flavours from each batch with the wild being more tropical, and the BA11 bringing more citrus notes. 47 cases were bottled Sept 25, 2008. This Sauvignon Blanc was bottled untraditionally in stretch hock glass because…well…that’s what we had!
2007 Five Rows Pinot Gris
The warm, dry Vintage of 2007 taught me an important lesson in Pinot Gris ripening. In early September, my wife and I decided to take a pre-harvest “recharging” trip to New York to see Broken Social Scene play at McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn. When we left, the Pinot Gris looked and tasted great with tiny berries, intense flavours and bountiful acidity. Upon returning three days later on Sept 10th, I nonchalantly grabbed a berry sample of the Gris, and to my astonishment it was showing a sugar level of 24.4 Degrees Brix and a Titratable Acidity (TA) of 6.5 g/L! The TA was taking a nosedive, and if we had decided to stay any longer in NYC I might have missed these perfect winemaking parameters! I hesitantly concede that there won’t be any more early September vacations for me. The quick decision was made to pick our roughly one tonne of Pinot Gris later that afternoon. The ferment was established in a stainless steel tank with a yeast strain called R2 that is renowned for long, cold ferments and great varietal character development. Over the next four weeks, the wine slowly chugged away while I occasionally stirred the lees to add some mouthfeel and complexity. I decided to stop the ferment at a specific gravity of 0.998 to leave the wine with a touch of residual sugar. 38 cases were bottled Sept 25, 2008.
Podcast & 2004 Cab Notes
A couple of weeks ago I was flattered to be asked to participate in a podcast interview with Sommelier Jamie Drummond of the Jamie Kennedy Wine Bar in conjunction with our upcoming limited release. I have to say that I was pretty nervous going in, but Jamie’s easygoing style and the comfortable restaurant atmosphere really put me at ease, to the point where I didn’t even realize we were being recorded. It was truly a pleasure to discuss such a broad array of topics with someone as knowledgeable and genuinely interested as Jamie. You can hear the podcast interview at: http://www.jamiekennedy.ca/v1/welcome.html
2004 FIVE ROWS CABERNET SAUVIGNON:
A wet summer gave way to a beautiful fall and great ripening conditions for the late varietals. This Cabernet Sauvignon was harvested on November 4, 2004. The Lowrey Cab Sauv is grown in two blocks which differ in vine age, clone, and soil profile. The older block is a mix of clones 337, 339 and 15, while the younger block is planted solely with clone 169. All vines are grafted onto low vigour rootstock 3309. Approximately 10 tonnes of fruit were picked that day, at an average of 21.5 degrees brix. Characteristically the older fruit gives the resulting wines structure and balance while the clone 169 block provides the ripe fruit notes.
The resulting fruit was processed in small batches with three daily punchdowns for maximum colour extraction. The wine was left on the skins to macerate following fermentation to help with tannin structure. The cooperage was primarily French (75%) and mainly older barrels (only 20% new oak). Overall time spent in barrel was 30 months. The wine for my blend was selected following an intensive barrel selection process where I actually pulled different volumes from a variety of barrels to compose my final 2 barrel blend. The majority of the blend (300L) came from two 2002 Gillet barrels that showcased good overall components of oak integration, aromatics and palate structure. The other 150L came from a new 2004 Taransaud barrel that featured amazing ripeness and notes of candied cherry and raspberry. This wine was bottled in the summer of 2007 and allowed to age gracefully in bottle for a year and a half before this release.
Cases: 45 Filtered & 2 Unfiltered
TA: 6.60g/L
pH: 3.67
Alcohol: 13.2%
An opportunity to try our wines.
Many of you have expressed interest in trying our wines and I can now announce some exciting news to that end. We’ve decided to launch a limited, unfiltered version of our 2004 Cabernet Sauvignon in two special restaurants: Treadwell’s in Port Dalhousie and Jamie Kennedy Wine Bar in Toronto. After two great tastings with sommeliers James Treadwell (Treadwell’s) and Jamie Drummond & Krista Brodhurst (Jamie Kennedy), it became apparent that we all shared a similar passion for viticulturally-focused craft wine. I was pleased to hear that they understand the amount of work it takes to produce small lots of wine from heavily thinned crops. The sacrifice of quantity for quality is not friendly to the winery or vineyard bottom line, unless the resultant wines merit being sold in the Ultra-premium sector of the market. My meetings with these sommeliers gave me the confidence that we are proceeding in the right direction with our brand, and that all the risk and hard work will be worth it in the end.
Within the next couple of weeks, each restaurant will be allotted 12 bottles of the Unfiltered Cab featuring a limited edition label complete with detailed viticulture and winery notes. I can’t wait for your feedback.
A Name For Our Winery
After much thought and deliberation, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve finally decided on a name for our winery. Our vision started back in the 80s with five rows of Pinot Noir. From this point on our wine will be known as “Five Rows Craft Wine of Lowrey Vineyards” or simply “Five Rows”. Essentially, all my wines will be made from a small portion of the Lowrey Vineyard crop (a couple rows of this and a couple rows of that) and that was a genesis of the “Rows” idea. The more we thought about it, the number Five was very meaningful to us, because of the original Pinot planting and because my father and I are among five generations of Lowrey’s to farm our land. Our packaging concept will emphasize the scarcity and hand-made feel we are trying to promote with the Five Rows brand. In the coming weeks we will launch a Five Rows website that will elaborate on the scope of our winery project and give details on the upcoming first vintage release. My blog will be incorporated into a component of the website, so stay tuned!