My favourite place to drink Chardonnay is the kitchen in Daniel Lenko‘s farmhouse in Beamsville. It’s not much to look at when you first walk in: old linoleum, dishes on the counter, and a cluttered breakfast table. It looks like your average kitchen in your average fruit farm. But then you notice that the walls are covered in wine awards. Lots and lots of wine awards.
This farm is Daniel Lenko Estate Winery and this kitchen is his tasting room, where he holds court every weekend for the tourists and wine-lovers who pull in off the QEW between Niagara and Toronto.
Lenko’s winery boasts the oldest wine-grape vines in Canada. Old vines are a big deal, because the older a vine gets, the deeper its rootstock digs into the rock beneath the soil, drawing up more minerals into the grapes. Minerality makes wine more complex and helps give it the longevity to evolve and improve in the cellar.
Although Lenko’s winery produces many grape varieties, it’s the Old Vines Chardonnay that really sets him apart. Visiting his winery is like getting a crash course in different styles of this wine:
- 2004 Old Vines Chardonnay (aged in American Oak)
$22.95[Ed. note: No longer available]. American oak makes Chardonnay bolder and heavier, generally imparting more flavours of vanilla and coconut but tasting like pine with too much age. This wine had rich notes of buttered toast and vanilla bean. The oak gives it a velvety texture, like butterscotch. It’s drinking well now. - 2004 Old Vines Chardonnay (aged in French Oak)
$29.95[Ed. note: No longer available]. French oak is subtler but gives a wine more potential to improve with age. The nose and palate was more restrained but also more complex, with a clean and pure acidity laced with the creaminess of a vanilla milkshake. It topped off with a long, sweet finish. I loved it and bought several bottles, though I won’t open any for about three years. - 2005 Signature Chardonnay Reserve (aged for 18 months in French Oak)
$39.95[Ed. note: No longer available]. This premium wine has received extra-aging. It’s powerful and dense with a gorgeous mouthfeel. It is the only white wine I have ever tried with a nose so rich it smelled like chocolate fudge – outrageously odd but also delicious. I would cellar this for 4-5 years to allow the woody flavours to fully integrate with the fruit.
The wines are fantastic, but one of the best reasons to make the trip to Lenko’s winery is to meet Lenko himself (See left, in the middle, with the whole wine-making family). There’s no one like him. He’s defiantly down-to-earth (he has no time for “wine geeks” and dismisses most wine critics as out of touch), but not so humble that he wouldn’t name his winery after himself. While other winemakers complain about how difficult it is to make money in the wine business, he proudly shows off his new sportscar (“If you can’t make money, what’s the point?” he asks). Other winemakers enshrinine their wines in beautiful glass and wood tasting rooms with panoramic views. He has an old kitchen. That’s enough, I suppose, when the wine can speak for itself.
Matthew Sullivan is a lawyer with the Department of Justice 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