2012 Niagara Icewine Tour Report 5/8: Creekside Estate Winery

Berserkers,

I embarked yesterday on the second and last tour of Niagara with the iYellow Wine Club and visited 4 different wineries with a tour bus full of 40 enthusiastic amateur wine lovers. The experiences were quite different this time around. Some were very positive, others were not particularly when we got to the lunch hour. I’ll go over that in the second report.

For the first report, we stopped in at Creekside Estate Winery. Creekside has undergone an interesting transition. They were responsible for creating the respectable Wayne Gretzky No. 99 Estates line of wines in 2007 and grew it from 5,000 cases sold a year to 40,000. However, last fall they sold the line to the much larger Andrew Peller Estates as they felt they had reached the maximum capacity they could for the line being a small independent winery and could not grow it any further.

This left them with an extra winemaking property and capacity and some intriguing possibilities for the future. Right now, they are exclusively focused on themselves and it will be interesting to see where they go from here without a split focus. In the midst of all this activity, their wines have certainly not lost any quality.

For the tour, our wines were paired with a beautiful butternut squash soup topped with smoked bacon compote for some kick. The soup was so popular over the Icewine Festival that apparently a ton of customers including many from the tour asked for the recipe and Creekside will comply by posting it on their website. On to the wines:

2011 SAUVIGNON BLANC – Our first tasting was a special sampling of this yet to be released 2011 vintage. Surprisingly powerful, fruit forward, and with a ton of grassy herb flavor. If I tasted this blind, I would’ve sworn it was a California wine. Easily one of the best Niagara-made Sauvignon Blancs I’ve ever had and Sauvignon Blanc is one of my least favorite varietals.

2007 RESERVE CHARDONNAY – Another powerful fruit forward shocker held together with a base of toasty oak. Once again, blind I would’ve sworn that this is exactly like a California Chardonnay. I’m an avowed card-carrying ABC (Anything But Chardonnay) club member and this impressed me. However, it’s California likeness is both its strength and its weakness. If you love the California style, you’ll be amazed this came out of Niagara. If you don’t like the California style, you’ll feel the same about this one.

2007 LAURA’S RED – Named for Creekside owner and founder Laura McCain, this wine blends the two Cabernets, Merlot, Malbec, and a touch of Petit Verdot. Very smooth red wine with very bold cherry and red fruit flavors and tannins that have been mellowed out by long oak aging. Respectable red with nice QPR.

2008 OAK AGED SHIRAZ ICEWINE (UNRELEASED BARREL TASTING) – As a special treat for the tour, winemaker Rob Power graciously siphoned off a pitcher full of this unreleased icewine for the tour straight from the barrel using a rubber hose. He joked about it now being an “icewine bong” with the hose attached, not realizing that I was seriously going to hook myself up to it. flirtysmile

Purely on a lark, they took exactly one barrel amount worth of the 2008 Shiraz icewine they made for the Wayne Gretzky line out of the traditional stainless steel tank when fermenting was done and have let it sit in an American oak barrel ever since. The result is the single most incredible red icewine I have ever tasted.

Full body, dark ruby red color, and an immediate hit of creamy vanilla and butterscotch notes from the oak followed by mellow cherry flavors and typical Shiraz black pepper like spice. Absolute icewine of the tour. We were very privileged to have had this and I can’t wait for them to release it. The entire barrel’s worth was apparently $13,000. I was more than ready to roll it out of there.

2007 VIDAL ICEWINE – A fat-style Vidal icewine with peach and apricot flavors, a full body, dialed back sweetness and some nice acidity.

2007 RIESLING ICEWINE – Even better, a fat-style Riesling icewine with bright lemon-lime and pineapple flavors. Good typical Riesling acidity to it.

OVERALL: With new directions on the horizon and new marketing to go with it (you can check out their new marketing scheme on their website), Creekside seems ready to go forward into the future with great product and a great attitude. The thing that struck me most about this visit was the high QPR of their product.

A testament to that quality is the fact that all of their icewine is above 11% ABV which means it was done in the “fat” high-quality style. This takes some rigorous winemaking skill to pull off for one icewine in a line, let alone all of them. I very much look forward to the release of their oak aged Shiraz icewine and will definitely be acquiring that one.