“Hello Fat-head,” she said from the veranda.
“Hello aged reptile,” I replied, climbing out of the car.
All in all, not the worst beginning to a week at the cottage with my mother-in-law. Every year, I decamp from Toronto and head to rural Nova Scotia, where the air is polluted with nothing more interesting than salt spray.
I do my best to enjoy the majestic maritime scenery by lodging myself in the darkest corner of the cottage and spending the time drinking and smoking. I take special delight in vetoing fieldtrips (“Blueberry picking? No thank you… visit a lavender farm? Piss off.”). However, this week, I tossed everyone for a loop by proposing an excursion of my own: “Let’s go to the Jost Vineyards.”
Nova Scotia has a tiny wine industry (10 wineries cultivating about 400 acres) that might seem easy to overlook… but this is a mistake. They kick it old school in Nova Scotia. It may not be the Bordeaux, but it is but it does offer a style of wine that is rare in North America and extinct in Europe. Nova Scotia makes some excellent wines from hybrid grapes.
Hybrids are retro-cool, like old trucking baseball caps or clunky eyeglasses. What are they?
99 percent of wine grapes (like Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon) now come from the species Vitis vinifera. Vinifera grapes yield wines of good quality, but they are hard to grow and difficult to ripen. As a result, when North Americans first started making wine, they avoided the hypersensitive vinifera grapes and opted instead for hybrids – vines bred to marry the hardiness of table grapes with the taste profile of vinifera. The drawback of hybrids is that the lack the tannins or complexity of vinifera, but they make up for it with soft fruit flavours and plenty of fertility.
Hybrids were once as common as dirt (primarily in New York and Ontario) but all this changed with the recent wine revolution that has seen consumers demand higher and higher quality. But falling out of fashion doesn’t mean hybrids are worthless – I think of them as the wine equivalent of a good grilled cheese sandwich.
Hybrid grapes like “Marechal Foch” or “Leon Millot” have the distinct flavour of our eastern seaboard heritage… and Nova Scotia’s premier winery, Jost, does them exceptionally well.
As an added bonus, my fieldtrip to Jost allowed me to demonstrate to my mother-in-law that I am not a boozer, but a wine critic. Stay tuned next week, when I will give my detailed tasting notes on Jost’s range of hybrid grapes.
Matthew Sullivan is a civil litigator in Toronto. He writes a weekly blog entry here on lawandstyle.ca. The Short Cellar column appears in the print edition of Precedent. Matthew can be reached at matthew@lawandstyle.beta-site.ca NEW! Follow along on Twitter: @shortcellar.