Tawse Chardonnay Quarry Road: 2006-2013 

BY IAN D’AGATA | AUGUST 30, 2016 

Tawse is a family-owned organic and biodynamic winery
located on the lower slopes of the Niagara Escarpment in Ontario’s Niagara wine
country. It was founded in 2001 by Moray Tawse, a banker in Toronto, who first bought
the property in 2000 and officially opened the winery in 2005. Paul Pender and
Rene Van Ede share winemaking duties; the former is the director of viticulture
and winemaking, the latter (a graduate of Australia’s Charles Stuart
University) is the winemaker. Pender, a former carpenter and graduate of Niagara College’s Winery and Viticulture
program, has been there
from the start in 2005, becoming Head Winemaker in 2006. In that time, he has
worked alongside a number of extremely high profile and very talented
winemakers, including Deborah Paskus and consultant Burgundian winemaker Pascal
Marchand. Marchand joined in 2006, but has since become primarily involved with
Tawse’s Burgundy properties.

In fact, just like many other wine lovers, Tawse has been a life-long
admirer of Burgundy and its wines; but he was able to do something concrete
about it, and in 2010 bought a small piece (6 ouvrées) of Morgeot, the premier cru in Chassagne-Montrachet. He
has since never looked back, and has gone on to buy other prime parcels of Burgundian
land, even extremely prestigious ones (for example, 2 ouvrées of Musigny) and created a line of Burgundy négociant wines under the&nbsp;Marchand-Tawse label. More importantly, in 2012 he landed Domaine Maume, a
storied name in Burgundy once famous for glorious Mazis-Chambertin wines, among
others. (Obviously, Tawse must have felt like he didn’t have enough to do
already, because since then he has also opened a second Niagara winery, called
Redstone.)<img alt="" src="https://allgrapes.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads%2F1472540422198-Panorama+of+Tawse+vineyards+copy.JPG"> <img alt="">Panorama of Tawse vineyards 

Tawse’s family namesake Niagara estate is one of the region’s crown
jewels. Notwithstanding the sheer beauty of the winery (it’s a state of the art
wine workplace, characterized by a six-level, gravity-flow
design, geo-thermal system and a wetland bio-filter) and vineyards
(on a clear day you can stand in the vines immediately around the winery
building and neatly see the Toronto skyline, CN Tower included, right across Lake
Ontario) and the numerous awards bestowed on the estate and its wines over the
years, you get a sense of purpose every time you taste a Tawse wine. The Tawse estate
currently encompasses over 200 acres (180 of which are under vine) and practices
Ecocert and Demeter certified organic and biodynamic agriculture. The estate is
planted mainly to Chardonnay, Riesling, Gamay, Pinot Noir, and Cabernet Franc,
but also has small parcels of Merlot, Syrah, Pinot Gris and Gewürztraminer.
However, the Chardonnay, Riesling and Pinot Noir amount to about 85% of Tawse’s
production.&nbsp; 

I have always found the Chardonnay and Cabernet Franc wines at Tawse to
have the greatest potential (the Pinot Noirs have also shown promise over the
years), though a tendency to over-oak everything was especially obvious in the
beginning. In my opinion, this oaky presence always camouflaged the fruit in Tawse’s
young wines, leaving me generally unimpressed. I gather I must have been in the
minority, as these highly acclaimed wines have garnered a bevy of medals and awards&nbsp;at
local wine fairs over the years. In any case, the overoaking appears to have
since been successfully reined in, and nowadays, Tawse makes some of Canada’s
most exciting, polished wines.<img alt="" src="https://allgrapes.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads%2F1472540828521-Tawse+estate+winery+buiilding+-+article.jpg"> Tawse estate winery buiilding 

Currently, Tawse’s best wine is the Quarry Road Chardonnay, made from a
single vineyard of 40 acres, of which nine are planted to Chardonnay (the
rest of which is Gewürztraminer, Pinot Noir
and Riesling). The Chardonnay vines were planted in 1996 and&nbsp;the first vintage of Tawse’s
Quarry Road Chardonnay was the 2006. In 2005 the grapes were eaten by hungry
birds; since then Tawse uses netting to safeguard the ripening grapes. As the
vineyard’s name implies, the soils (mainly clay-limestone-loam) are especially
rich in limestone. In fact, there’s an old limestone quarry nearby, from which
the vineyard and road take their names. The Quarry Road&nbsp;tends to always be the leanest and most
mineral of all the Tawse Chardonnays. It’s a very successful example of cool
climate Chardonnay the Niagara region is justly famous for (or should be). The wine's generally&nbsp;lean, high-acid profile is also the result of the vineyard being located in
the higher altitude, generally cooler Vinemount Ridge Designated Viticultural
Area (the Ontario Designated Viticultural Areas are the equivalent of France’s Appellations or Italy’s Denominazioni). At three tons per acre, the
Quarry Road Chardonnay yields aren’t especially low, but Pender told me he
believes that when cropped lower, the wine tends to become blowsy, too ripe and
concentrated, and loses greatly in finesse.<img alt="" src="https://allgrapes.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads%2F1472540660662-Paul+Pender%2C+director+of+winemaking+and+viticulture+at+Tawse+%28with+the+lineup+of+Chards%29+-+article.JPG"> Paul Pender, director of winemaking and viticulture at Tawse (with the lineup of Chards) 

Pender likes to pick earlier rather than late (not surprisingly, total
acidities are on the high side in this wine, ranging from 7-8.5 g/L), but admits
liking Chardonnays that have vibrant acidity (not at all an unreasonable
stance, I may add). For this reason, malolactic transformation isn’t always
carried through completely. The wine stays about six months on the lees and ages
twelve months in French oak barrels. Initially only 228 liter barriques were used, but in an effort to
have wines less dominated by oak, Tawse has gradually moved over to 500L tonneaux. The first tonneaux were used in 2009, and today, about 50% of the wine ages
in tonneaux rather than barriques. In any case, the Quarry Road
Chardonnay appears to age splendidly. About 12,000 bottles of this wine are
made a year (the estate’s total annual wine production is about 30,000 cases.<a target="_blank" href="http://vinous.com/wines?wine_filter%5Barticle_id%5D=1446&amp;sort%5Bdirection%5D=asc&amp;sort%5Bname%5D=id">See all the wines</a> <img alt="" src="https://allgrapes.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads%2F1472540929918-The+entrance+to+the+Tawse+estate+copy.jpg"> The entrance to the Tawse estate

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