As a novice bartender, I was taught to sell the more expensive wines and spirits by telling their story, making them “taste better” by giving the customer a sense of grander appropriation. For example, “at dawn the vines are sung to by midgets; the grapes are not barbarically crushed, but verbally coaxed into liberating their juices; the juice is then not just fed with the gentility of gravity flow, but anyone that makes eye contact with it is fired.” I have been selling a number of Niagara's Organized Crime wines in my restaurant for some time now, so I asked myself, “what story should I be telling”?
Waiting in the 7am line on the bus platform, a young teen paced in front of me in broad orbit, a thin layer of skin over an ocean of indignation concerning whatever condemned him to this part of Ontario. Grimsby, one of the countless dust-mites on the back of the docile meadow-roaming beast that is Canada. The town is quaint in that polished way that is almost offensive. People say “hello” in department stores and they don’t even work there. Truckers driving down a main street suddenly snap and begin honking wildly to defibrillate the sleepy flanks of manicured Victorian homes and oubliettes of planned residential areas with winey names.1 The huge spine of verdant rock looms over everyone like a dormant volcano, keeping the village humble, stationary, afraid to upset the giant.
If you continued tracing a circle from the 725km arc that is the Niagara Escarpment you can draw the perimeter of a giant dent in the earth that was a tropical sea about half a billion years ago. In the center bubbled the state of Michigan, pickling in saltwater for aeons. Today, the ridge is basically an artifact shoreline turned agricultural manna, an ever-giving waterslide of mineral-rich erosion into a bed of geologically-milled aquatic fossils. As I passed Hamilton, the shelf peered on in dismay at what looks like a graveyard of crashed starships in a tormented heap, casualties of some huge celestial battle. The only materials these industrial dragons seemed to produce were black piles of concentrated night terrors and smoke specially designed to remain permanently suspended in the air like middle fingers to the ecosphere.
Arriving in Grimbsy I took the much-needed 9km walk to the Beamsville Bench, where along the way I saw some of the most uncannily proud willow trees bursting like geyser popsicles from the buzzcut grounds of parks. They were like a sudden resurrection of the ancient sea through its crusty new cage. Of course, considering it would once again swallow the cities of Hamilton, Rochester, Detroit and other prodigal stains, the “sea” would probably become more of a viscous grey-brown swamp of industrial waste. There is one good reason in all of Southern Ontario that we are no longer submerged in oceanic brine and it revealed itself at the end of my walk where Niagara wine country began.
It’s hardly the serene experience one would expect. With “bangers” (basically blank artillery shells) detonating with regular frequency to scare away birds, it was as though a war for Ontario’s viticultural hold was going on just over the escarpment. I wondered if the sound distressed the fruit. Foolish yes, but it’s easy to consider winemaking a delicate process that cannot be messed with. The vineyards look like a horticultural old folks home. Corridors of boney old vines drag around their pendulous grape bunches like IV's, hunched onto their trellises, too spindly to stand on their own. The fruiting zones are covered in wire mesh to protect them from birds, primarily the ravenous starling, which eats multiples of its body weight daily. If they puncture just one grape, a cavity of rot spreads throughout the entire bunch. The freshly-emptied-dumpster tang of decomposition is constantly wafting up. Everything in the Niagara region says “be careful.” The wineries' operational buildings are planned-to-be-bland, demonstrating that same stucco-and-grey-brick frigidity of Grimsby's housing crops, just estate-sized.
One exception to this is the Organized Crime winery, which makes no attempt at polish. The first person I encountered their was Christina, the clerk at their tasting room/retail store, which was visually humble in a way that wasn’t even trying to be. Outside was a house-sized building held together with siding. Inside was basically my grandmother's living room. Christina spoke with that kind of aenemic honesty that could only be complimented by the lash of her Eastern European accent.
“Buy it now, or buy it on eBay in 6 months for twice as much.” And she would be right.
To involve me in the next harvest she had put me through to a pleasant, accommodating man who seemed happy to have me on board. Little did I know that this was Andre Lipinski, the winemaker himself, and probably the most prolific in the eastern lobe of the country. Spending his days driving between projects – also the winemaker for Foreign Affair, a consultant for a number of others2, and a frequent aid in processing crops for wineries without the appropriate equipment3 – he has acquired the nickname “the travelling winemaker,” an oenological catalyst bouncing around the country. The awards he has won over the years, just in sheer quantity, are staggering and he hired me, an anonymous pair of hands, directly. Niagara viticulture is nothing if not accessible.
One look at a Niagara wine label and you can get a sense of that accessibility, a light-heartedness that betrays none of its cold caution. The labels like to mock the solemnity, exaltation and rigid production laws that have for centuries defined the Old World of winemaking. At first glance Lipinski’s wineries seem equally as playful and quirky, complete with the usual clever wordplay4. The story of Organized Crime is told on a sequence of panels, one per bottling: “Sometime in the early-to-mid 1900’s, there were two quarreling Mennonite congregations, who disagreed about the acquisition of a pipe organ, which led to one congregation breaking into the other church, stealing the organ and then tossing it down an embankment.” A silly little nugget of Niagara micro-history or a metaphor for the binds of traditional winemaking mores?
But the New World creates its own norms and restrictions too. Being defiantly fresh and fruity and cheerful is sometimes an inescapable confine of Niagara winemaking. So in 2003, Lipinski made a Riesling Reserve for Legends Estate Winery that tasted so Old World, so noxiously German and so impossibly beyond the Niagara extraction, it was as though someone temporarily grafted a slab of the Rheingau onto the escarpment. With the Foreign Affair Winery, he takes this new-to-old-and-consequently-back-to-new-again approach even further, forming a manifold of insubordination: The Appassimento method of drying the grapes out before fermentation, which tempers a wine with diabolical levels of concentration that has only ever – not “traditionally” or “generally,” literally ever – been executed with the most hallowed of Venetian reds. Lipinsky does it with 2 red and 3 different white (white!) varietals, inciting backlash and whispers of “now he’s just being different for the sake of it” from Niagara’s old guard.
Are they even that, though? Wise veterans or the small, cautious spirits of what’s really still a new guard with an adolescent inferiority complex? And why scoff at ambition in a country that is already on its way to making world class cool climate wine? Not only great whites, but fantastic Pinot Noirs and Cabernet Francs. Of course when one thinks of truly Stanley Kubrick levels of standalone Cabernet Franc, what might come to mind is the mighty Quintarelli Alzero, which was hitherto the only Appassimento-style red attempted besides Amarone. Lipinski, leaping the chasm, decided he could make one too. Commanding an unspeakable $110 for it, it has etched itself into multiple wine lists, including Canoe, the top-rated restaurant in Toronto. And his reputation continues to stab northerly. Lipinski’s portfolios are the talk of all those effortlessly cool post-Bistros of Toronto’s west end, along with many of the upper-brow fine-dineries that have finally conceded to recognize their own backyard on their wine list and figure they should at least make it count.
I wondered if it’s really true that labor-intensive things actually taste better. I wondered if I’d just be fooling myself like all the other sadistic gourmands out there if I actually let the wines make a believer out of me. As I swirled the glass of slave-driven juice I tried not to think of the grapes and their 100-day sentence in a wind dungeon, engines constantly blasting the moisture out of the air, starving them to raisins. They pray for mold to take them, but the conditions are too arrid for any trophic life. I try not to think of that agonizing couple drops of nectar squeezed from every humiliated bauble of fruit. But as the first honeyed currents of Foreign Affair’s Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling and Chardonnay rolled over my tongue, the flavors suspended me in such hanging contemplation that I wondered where a willow tree was when I needed one. Already hauntingly complex, they’ve hardly even aged yet. This is serious wine, a brutally delicious liquid Frankenstein. It becomes apparent that the caution of Niagara winemakers is that same species of fear that paralyzes the possibilities of brilliant audacity in every other field.
For Lipinsky, the labor, the process, is all in service of something bigger. That is the story of his wines: “you’re about to taste something that no one has attempted before.” Is it pretentious or exactly the opposite in a field where bold moves are just not worth the risk? As I think back to Organized Crime, I can’t help but see the threads of a modernist romanticism. It’s new world without the innocence, old world without the narrowness. A rebel that no one asked for, defying an oppressive force that everyone thinks is just a couple playground rules to ensure safety. ORGAN-ized Crime: making music when everyone was enjoying the quiet.
Footnotes:
The subdivision “Vineyard Valley” can be entered through the streets Cabernet Drive and Chardonnay Place.
Including Turkey Point, which pulls us 100km outside of wine-country-proper and into Ontario’s tobacco belt. where farmers are pulling their crops and replacing them with a more romantic vice.
Including wineries that haven’t even been constructed yet; they just have grapes and the skeleton of a building
See Daniel Lenko’s well-received release of Chardongay to raise money for AIDS as well as John Howard’s Megalomaniac line (SonOfABitch Pinot Noir, Narcissist [spelled backwards on the bottle] Riesling, MyWay Chardonnay, etc), a self-effacing jab at the archetype of egotistical wine virtuosos.
