Immediately bordering the winery buildings on Fourth Avenue and providing a very dramatic (and very tasty) view as you come down the driveway, is the Creekside Estate Vineyard.  We like to think of it as the quietly consistent, patient older sibling to our Queenston Road Vineyard on the St. David’s Bench.  With about 13 acres under vine, the Creekside site does its thing, year in and year out, with little showboating and few demands.  It is, to be honest, a little taken for granted.  We expect the fruit to be good — it always has been– so we very rarely worry, fuss, or fret.

The vineyard, as described by winemaker Rob, is “technically in no man’s land for viticulture in Niagara”.  It boasts proximity neither to the Niagara Escarpment, nor Lake Ontario, sitting midway between these two major temperature modulating geographical features.  As a result, the vineyard is slightly more susceptible to cold weather bud damage, but also benefits from being slightly warmer during the summer season.  Grapes, like people, are at their best in the face of adversity, and the vines here struggle in the heavy duty clay soil, rewarding perseverance with consistently concentrated, reliably solid wines from this vineyard.

Cabernet Sauvignon

The Creekside Estate Vineyard Cab Sauv is the good-natured grunt of our Cab program, anchoring the Estate Cabernet, and contributing regularly to Laura Red.   It’s comprised of two blocks, one at the eastern most area of the vineyard, and the other sandwiched between the two blocks of Sauvignon Blanc, is located in the back block.   It’s never flashy, and but it’s also never ever thin, weedy, or green flavoured, even in cool years which, in a cool region like Niagara, is more frequent than we would like.  It’s the type of vineyard that winemakers love: consistent, reliable, attaining good colour and ripe flavours regardless of vintage.  We’d like to take this opportunity to thank, publically, this very humble block of Cab Sauv…we may not always show it the love it deserves, but we know we’d be lost without it.

Shiraz

Surprisingly complex and interesting some years, solid but a little dull in others, this tiny planting, wedged between the long rows of Cab and the Long Row block of Sauvignon Blanc, is the most rebellious of the bunch.  A bit of a troublemaker really, fluctuating in ripeness and overall quality more than the Cab, and a little temperamental even at the best of times.  The Creekside Estate Vineyard Shiraz is mercurial, literally, performing above average in good to great years, and grumpily toeing the average line when growing conditions haven’t been to its liking.  In every vineyard there’s the varietal that keeps you scratching your head and here, it’s our Shiraz, but we love it anyway.

Sauvignon Blanc

The Sauvignon Blanc grown at this site, from both the “Long Rows” block and the “Short Rows” block, are the heart and soul of our award-winning Sauv Blanc program, generally making up the majority of the Estate Sauv Blanc, and in many years  the entirety of our Reserve Sauv Blanc.  The Long Row block is located right along the side of the parking lot and extends along the length of all three winery buildings.  The Short Row block makes it’s home along the tree line in the back block.  This variety out of all planted here seems to show vintage variation from year to year, ranging from steely, grassy citrus zip in cooler years, to full-on tropicality in warmer years, showing the whole spectrum of varietal character.

Hot Tip: The 2007 Reserve Sauvignon Blanc (yet to be released) is 100% from the Creekside Estate Vineyard (53% Short Row / 47% Long Row).  If you follow Creekside on Twitter, Facebook, or receive the monthly newsletter, the News Stream, you’ll get advance notice of the release date.  If you like your Savvy B big, potent and tropical, this is the Reserve for you.  It’s already showed its stuff by winning Gold in the Sauvignon Blanc/Semillon category at the 2009 Ontario Wine Awards.

If you’re ever by the winery for the daily 2pm tour, you’ll get a chance to have a closer look at the vineyard (likely the Long Row Sauv Blanc). Now is a fantastic time to stop by, what with harvest right around the corner and the grapes soaking in as much sun as possible.

Single vineyard wines from this site are very rare (like the 07 Reserve Sauv Blanc), but easy to identify…just check above the varietal name on our reserve labels for “Creekside Estate Vineyard”.

Marketing Propaganda Link (aka Official Wine Info)

Look, we’ll be honest…we wish we had tales of struggling ferments, crazy blending trials, and other tidbits of insider information, but this wine all but made itself.  Clean fruit, clean careful ferment, clean filtration…just plain clean, crisp, varietally correct aromatics and a really refreshing palate.  In a difficult, rainy vintage, our gris was like a glowing beacon of comfort amid panic about later-ripening varieties.  It was a delight and we love it not only because it happens to be quite smashing (biased? us?), but also because it was like a happy, healthy baby: a joy to be around, well-behaved, and lacking in poopy diapers of all descriptions.    It’s all grown up and left the tank now, spouting egotistical slogans about its party prowess, but we like to remember it fondly as unfermented juice fresh off the press and so full of (now realized) potential.

One would think that the path from juice to wine wouldn’t differ much from vintage to vintage, winery to winery, but here at Creekside we do something just a little crazy: we name our equipment.  Cellar jobs that read like “rack T0-01 to T0-07″ are like nails on a chalkboard to our production staff. We’d rather have a root canal than say crusher/destemmer thirty times a day during harvest.  Why not make operations easy to remember and actually (*gasp*) entertaining?

Take this 2008 Pinot Grigio for example…its literal path to you, the consumer, was very different from the 2007, despite the fact that the vinification process was identical.  Whereas one may have been touched by great philosophers, the other may have been blessed by stellar musicians.  Where one may have conversed with great political minds, the other might have hung out with the great characters of fictions past and present. To demonstrate, here’s what the 2008 Pinot Grigio’s workflow would have looked like through the eyes of the production team.  If anyone can figure out that diagram without explanation, we’re not sure whether to be ecstatic or concerned for your mental well-being.  Click the thumbnail below and the image will open in a new window.  Buckle up and follow along, this is The Story of Creekside’s 2008 Pinot Grigio.

In The Making: 2008 Pinot Grigio

It started with two main batches of fruit from the Niagara Lakeshore appellation that came in two weeks apart in the fall of 2008 (note the cool colour of the grapes in the picture, a great identifier for gris).  The fruit was then dumped from the picking bins into Mad Max (the fruit hopper), whose giant auger moves the delicate bunches into Beverly (the crusher/destemmer), who spits out all the stems and gets everything ready for Barney (so named for being a giant purple must pump, slow moving but still somehow creepy).  Barney passes the fruit along to Paparazzi, or Papa for short (the press), who squeezes the fruit to yield the juice that will eventually become our Grigio.  Papa’s pressing are pumped into tanks, left to cold settle, and then racked off gross less to fermentation tanks.  In this case, Simon (Paul Simon, a 156hL tank) and Winston (Winston Churchill, a 256hL tank) were chosen for ferment duty and inoculated.  The juice fermented to dryness pretty smoothly, with no major alarms, and when a trial blend of roughly half of Simon + 100hL of Winston was decided on, the two batches were filtered and blended to Buddha (a rotund 315hL tank) before bottling and release to you (that’s you at the bottom, a very excited Grigio fan).

No oak, no lees stirring, no muss, no pretension.  This wine proudly wears its heart on its sleeve and expresses the best that a crisply styled Grigio has to offer, unfettered and unadorned.

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