Greetings Riesling Land,
As the days get longer, it is the time to introduce a new vineyard and vintage of Riesling. This project is based on capturing snapshots of the Niagara Escarpment through the lens of Riesling – one vineyard at a time.
Since 2005, I have been working with the Picone Vineyard on Vinemount Ridge. The wine has been consistent in depth and character. If you have followed this wine, you will have come to love it's generous mouth-filling texture that is balanced by finely streamed acidity. It is a fragrant wine, a floral wine, a Niagara Riesling.
The 2009 CB Riesling from the Picone Vineyard is everything I wish it could be – nervy, rich, even-keeled, oddly loud, and above all delicious. 2009 gave our team very little fruit to work with. We made the least amount of wine from the largest surface of the vineyard. In fact we used the entire vineyard and only bottled just over 300 cases. What does this mean? Well for one it means even more concentrations and extract of that elusive character we all chase. We ultimately hope we capture a little "there, there" in our wines.
This wine is perhaps the fleshiest of them all. I like it like that. It goes well with all sorts of fleshy food.
To purchase the 2009 Picone Riesling, please click here. You will have few regrets. Few have.
My continued gratitude to Mark Picone for trusting me with his magical vineyard and to Phil Clarke for his exemplary vineyard management.
In early 2010, I met Bob Nedelko, proprietor of the tidy 12-acre Ivan vineyard on the Twenty-Mile Bench. Just over 1 acre is devoted to Riesling. We shook hands and got down to work. The result is a fiery, chrome-plated, truck-munching Riesling. There is plenty of ripe lime-orange rind character with a firm, pungent, penetrating palate. To achieve this, we cropped to a very parsimonious 1.3 tonnes per acre. At the winery, we sorted to keep only the ripest berries of the bunch. We managed to bottle just 90 cases. Not enough for a big party really!
To make wine the way we do, we rely on vineyards for the most part but we must have partners who believe. In the Nedelko's, I have found that vineyard partner yet again and I am proud to label the wine from the vineyard Ivan, named after Bob's Father.
My continued gratitude to the team at Stratus for their on-going support of this winemaking effort.
Please order here. We will ship to you or you may pick up your order at Stratus Vineyards in Niagara-on-the-Lake.
Wishing you an outstanding end to 2011.
— CB