Just finished a crazy tasting of top Canadian microbrews. Top ones, http://t.co/WNT2JZjO, http://t.co/mgSu7ADf, http://t.co/yiK7BC2H
| 29 July 2009
No critic in any discipline, be it literature, music, dance, architecture, theatre, film or cuisine — at any point in human history — has had as much power and influence on his or her chosen field as Robert B. Parker. Parker’s 100-point system dictates what wines will sell and what wines won’t.
A Parker score of 90 points or above will ensure that the product will fly off the shelves globally. Eighty-seven points just won’t cut it.
The one-time Maryland lawyer and founder of the newsletter The Wine Advocate, champions super-ripe, richly extracted, powerful wines. So much so that the French, who have the most to lose by not pleasing Parker’s palate, have coined a verb that describes the process of making wine that will appeal to him: “parkeriser.” Loosely translated, this means: to produce a wine with as much flavour as possible for a desired Parker score.
So much power concentrated in the palate of one man may seem dangerous; but I don’t consider this necessarily a bad thing. Since the 1980s French producers have relied too heavily on their past reputations and have not responded quickly enough to competition from the New World. Many of the fabled wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy were picked under-ripe whenever the weather forecast threatened rain around harvest time or were aged in barrels that deserved to be cut in half and used as flowerpots.
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| 23 June 2009
The Ontario wine industry has lost one of its pioneers just when the Icewine was ready for picking. John Marynissen, a grape grower in the Niagara Peninsula for 55 years, died at the age of 84 on January 2nd after a protracted illness that had hospitalized him.
John immigrated to Canada from Holland in 1952 and got a job picking fruit in Niagara Falls. A year later he and his wife Adriana purchased a farm in Niagara-on-the-Lake, which already had a small labrusca vineyard. But John had ambitions to grow the noble grapes of Europe. Against all the accepted wisdom he planted Cabernet Sauvignon in 1978 — the year he was elected Ontario’s Grape King.
This was the first Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard in Canada. John made wine from these grapes using carbonic maceration, and I recall tasting one of his bottlings with Ken Douglas (then a lawyer and award-winning home winemaker, now a lawyer and co-owner of 13th Street Winery). We were sitting in John’s living room on the farm and he brought up a series of wines from his basement — Chardonnay, Riesling and a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. It was terrific, just one of a string of first-class wines in his amateur portfolio.
