T-Dot and Vin d'Ontario

A quick visit to Toronto to catch up with friends and relatives, and a quick peek at some Niagara wine.

We happened to be up for Toronto's Nuits Blanche, the dusk to dawn open air "arts festival". Perhaps we were just in the wrong section of town (U of T), but it was mostly drunk people and litter. The art must have been somewhere else.

Fortunately, there was ice cream.

Our wine-time was limited, as it would take place on the way home, but we did manage to try a few products over lunch. One that I'd heard positive murmurings about was the 2008 Cave Spring Dry Riesling. Sadly, it was not. Well, not Keuka dry. Maybe Seneca dry. Over lunch we had slightly more success with some humorously named wines. For R., the 2006 Organized Crime Syrah, definitely more Rhone than Victoria, brambly and light. A little short, but pleasant enough. For me it was the 2006 Megalomaniac Vainglorious, a cab-merlot that was marked with a vegetality not unfamiliar in some of the Upstate New York wines. Could have used a touch more ripeness to bring it together.

Lunch out of the way, and having done just a tiny bit of research, we settled on just one visit, to Malivoire, self-described as combining "Bauhaus form with Newtonian function." From the sounds of it, they are also somewhere beyond "organic". I wasn't interested in all that, only that they produce a gamay. I don't mind at all that they like to minimise the use of filtration though.

Only some of Malivoire's vineyards are adjacent to the winery, located on the Niagara "Bench".

The tanks loom somewhat disconcertingly above the tasting room, but in actual fact are built onto the hillside.

We samples a few things, but the wine of note was definitely the one we had come for, the 2009 M2 Small Lot Gamay - available only on-site, and at some select Toronto restaurants. It was certainly lean and earth-driven, more Burgundian than Beaujolais, with a certain Saint Laurent wildness to it that I enjoyed quite a bit.

Now, I hear there is a producer somewhere in Ontario doing Zweigelt, so that will have to move up on the list of things to try.