CUVEE! (Friday)

Holy crap! What a weekend. I love the Cuvee touring passports. For $20, you buy a passport and all kinds of wineries participate and if you visit with your passport, you get to taste for free (at most places) some special offerings. Some serve wines that they've entered into the cuvee competition, some offer past winners or special vintages. On Friday, we stayed close to home an toured around Beamsville. Our first stop was Peninsula Ridge. They were pouring Cabernet Francs, J's favorite red. We got to compare 2001 & 2002 regular and reserve. The 2001 Reserve was very good. We bought a bottle and headed down the road to the next stop, Fielding Estate Winery.


Fielding is fairly new on the Ontario wine scene.Their cheif winemaker is Andrzej Lipinski who came over from Legends. I love Fielding whites. I think they do a very good job with those. We have a few assorted bottles from the summer and on this stop we picked up a 2004 Chardonnay Reserve and a 2004 Riesling Reserve. Both extremely tasty and will be much enjoyed I'm sure!




Our next stop of note on Friday was at Lakeview Cellars. J also like Baco Noir and this was the feature at Lakeview. They were pouring some old bacos. One as far back as 1993! I'd never had one that old and frankly didn't think they were that age-worthy. It was remarkably good! It's obviously not going to last much longer and should be drunk in the next few months. We bought 2 and I'm going to give one to Michelle before she leaves for Calgary. She likes a good baco as well. I prefered the 1997 they had and bought one of those as well and had it with burgers while watching the Oscars.


On to Malivoire. I really like this place. It's a gravity flow set-up and very impressive. We tasted some great wines. They were offering Merlot and Cab Franc, which they don't usually make and a special 2002 Cabernet Merlot. We'd had some of this before and it's very good. Malivoire does Marechal Foch extremely well. So, of course, we tried the newly released 2004 as well. Mmm-mmm-mmm! We bought a couple of bottles of that to take home. The gentleman behind the bar told us that their Foch vines are getting old and aren't bearing much fruit anymore, so in a couple of years there will probably be no more! I'd better tell Emilie as soon as I see her. That's her favorite wine. The sad thing about wine...once it's gone, it's gone.

We also did some touring on Saturday and Sunday, but I'll continue on with that later.