Wine & Spirits - April 2020 - 43

MALIVOIRE WAS ONE
OF THE FIRST WINERIES
IN ONTARIO TO TAKE
GAMAY SERIOUSLY. THEY
FARM 15 ACRES OF THE
VARIETY, AND PLAN TO
PLANT 11 MORE OVER
THE NEXT TWO YEARS.

ney are smaller, providing more concentrated juice and a
greater skin-to-juice ratio, which produces a more tannic
wine.) "This is a wine for ageing and not glou glou," he says.
"We have also started to incorporate concrete tanks, locally
made with local materials, which somehow delivers what I
can best describe as scrumptious tension."
"I am only starting to hone in on terroir expressions,"
says Mottiar, "but they are clearly there. Our bench sites
[Beamsville Bench and Twenty Mile Bench] have great
depth and firm acidity that carries intense, dark flavors.
Gamays from Niagara-on-the-Lake are more perfumed,
slightly lighter in color and weight, with nice juiciness to
them. And at our sites on the Vinemount Moraine, above
the Niagara Escarpment where it is much cooler, gamay
packs so much juicy, dark crisp fruit without the underlying pepper."
One of Ontario's most renowned winemakers, Thomas
Bachelder, also recently started working with gamay. Bachelder established his reputation for site-specific chardonnay
and pinot noir from Niagara, and he has been making wine
from these varieties in Oregon and Burgundy each year.
While pinot is still his first love, he's become a believer in
gamay from Ontario, making a Niagara "Villages" Gamay,
and several Niagara "Crus," or single vineyards. He's been
using spontaneous fermentations and experimenting with

"Gamay is
extremely
terroirsensitive-
excitingly so:
Think of the
chasm between
Fleurie and
Chenas. That
kind of range."

aging the wines in neutral barrels for 14 months and longer.
"I've gone from zero to fifty-five percent whole cluster, with
five, ten and twenty-five percent whole cluster in between."
He's tinkering with percentages of whole clusters to make
the wine fruitier and prettier-"with a view to exposing the
true terroir of a site, not for putting makeup on a wine."
"Gamay is a bit underrated because Beaujolais itself was
underrated for a long time," he says. "The vine yields more
than pinot, so how can it be noble? It is like pinot in weight
and tone, that's the good news -but it can be more acidic,
almost leafy sometimes. Sometimes loveably crushable,
sometimes a bit brash and lean." But, like other growers in
Niagara, Bachelder finds that "gamay is extremely terroirsensitive-excitingly so: think of the chasm between Fleurie
and Chénas. That kind of range."
"We most definitely think gamay has great potential
in Niagara," says Pearl Morissette's Atcheva. "It can give
'smashable' wines, but also wines of attitude and presence
that, despite their immense drinkability, have nuance and
complexity." Their first gamay in 2013 was made and bottled without added sulfiites. "It has been drinking wonderfully for a few years now," says Atcheva, "with no signs of
premature aging or any bacterial problems." This was 100
percent whole clusters, fermented and aged in concrete.
But the team at Pearl Morrisette doesn't like carbonic
maceration. "Gamay here in Niagara has some extra spiciness and density of fruit that we feel expresses best without having to amplify it through carbonic or semi-carbonic
approaches," says Atcheva. "It's just our approach-we're
people that don't get overly enthused about fruit in wines,
but hanker for structure, texture, nuance and balance.
Niagara naturally gives us all of these qualities and gamay
has the capacity to express it with a wink and a very nonchalant, but confident attitude."
In 2012, Dr. Janet Dorozynski coined #gogamaygo.
Dorozynski works for the Canadian government on international business development for the wine industry and is
a wine educator and writer outside of her day job. "I have
always had a soft spot for gamay, as I first tasted a number
of Cru Beaujolais in the late 1990s and didn't really understand why the Beaujolais region, or this grape variety, was
considered a lesser region to Burgundy or variety to pinot
noir. The hashtag," she says, "was my tiny way to try to
get lovers of juicy lighter-bodied reds to take notice of the
variety." Interestingly, this hashtag has now been adopted
by the Beaujolais interprofessional body in its marketing
campaigns.
"Outside of Beaujolais, I don't think there is any other
region in the world that has the critical mass planting of
gamay that exists in Ontario," Dorozynski says. She points
out that Ontario's vineyard regions have short, humid,
warm growing seasons followed by freezing winters: many
varieties have struggled here because they don't do well
over winter. And Bachelder agrees. "It's as cold hardy -or
more so-than pinot or chardonnay," he says, "and this is
partly because it is so fruitful and throws out a lot of canes
and buds. You still get a decent gamay crop after a bit of a
tough winter."
Pinot noir is doing well in Ontario, but it is tricky to grow
here, and the resulting wines are expensive. Could changing perceptions among both growers and consumers help
gamay someday eclipse it? n
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