The New Matriarch of Niagara Wine
Kelly Mason on making wine at her eponymous vineyard.
Kelly Mason produces wines that attract a cult-like fandom, using grapes from her uncannily primped vineyard on Niagara’s Twenty Mile Bench.
Kelly Mason produces wines that attract a cult-like fandom, using grapes from her uncannily primped vineyard on Niagara’s Twenty Mile Bench.
Produced from grapevines growing in the rocks and ash deposited by volcanic activity, Volcanic wines erupted onto the world’s wine landscape.
Today, winemakers around the world produce multi-vintage still wines in the same spirit as champagne as well as in the name of experimentation and luxury.
Do Quebec wine consumers really like more-acidic wines than their Ontario counterparts? What about British Columbians? It’s actually not simply a matter of acidity but of style generally: a wine’s weight or body, fruit-acid balance, sugar and alcohol levels, and tannins.
The sheer proliferation of wine glasses, each dedicated to a specific variety or style, has itself probably been the undoing of that approach to glasses. How many wine glasses do you really need? The short and simple answer: one.
The Jura region and its wines are small but mighty, and Vin jaune, the yellow wine from France, will be your next obsession.
This is the Age of Wine. Should it be surprising that celebrities, like entrepreneurs everywhere, want to be part of it?
The pleasure wine gives varies according to circumstances and mood, but many drinkers look for objective ratings when buying it. Reviewers all over the world rate wines out of 100 points, and many bottles carry stickers showing they scored 88, 90, or 93 points. But the 100-point system is not the only way wines are rated.
Many wineries, especially in New World regions, make what they call an icon wine. It is generally a limited-production red wine, the most expensive in a producer’s portfolio, and it sometimes comes in a bottle that’s heavier than the winery’s other bottles, as if to alert consumers to the wine’s gravitas.