Niagara Escarpment

WBW #36 Naked Chardonnay

My contribution to this month's WBW aka Wine Blogging Wednesday is totally by chance as like most deadlines in my life, it snuck up on me fast. I stopped at Eveningside Winery in the Niagara Escarpment AVA this past Sunday for a tasting. I was passing by and thought since I hadn't been inside for a year, it would be well worth a stop. I've written about Eveningside Winery before and had been impressed by their balanced red wines, including a Cab Franc/Cab Sauv blend and their Claret. This time around I found out they had just sold out their first estate-grown single varietal Cabernet Franc, and after I accepted this fact, I got into tasting the dry whites. I was most impressed by the naked Chardonnay and the oaked Chardonnay, with my purchase coincidentally being of the naked variety.

Eveningside Vineyards Chardonnay 2006
Niagara Escarpment, New York ($14)

Now there are a few things you should know about this winery. For one, I'm pretty sure that the owner, Randy Biehl, only has one acre of his own grapes on site. Another thing you must know if that he trained on the Niagara Peninsula in Ontario, Canada where grapes like Riesling, Chardonnay, and Cabernet Franc can thrive under the right vineyard manager and winemaker. The soils and climate of the Niagara Escarpment AVA are extremely similar and Randy's wines are just as good if not better than most I've tasted across the border. His extremely small-batch production gives him complete control over the quality of his wines and it shows.

This 2006 "naked" Chardonnay is a taste of heaven. Pale yellow in the glass, it offers generous aromas of apple, pineapple, and honey. The texture is dangerously delicate as it walks the line of a having crisp acidity and a suppleness that I found to be as attractive as any white wine I've had in recent memory. The finish is long and clean. My fiance and I were literally blown away by this wine. Let's face it Eveningside Winery, just as the Niagara Wine Trail, is very much in its youth, but if this wine is any indication of what's in store for the future, then I see a hell of a lot of naked wine drinking to come.

Data Servers as far as the Eye Can See

Servers and computers are the future cash crop for Cambria according to HSBC Bank and the proof is in the 77 acres purchased with the intention of building a $1 billion dollar data center in Cambria, NY. This article was brought to my attention because author interviewed a Niagara Wine Trail winery owner in Cambria to talk about the housing and land market values. Lori Hoover, of Honeymoon Trail Winery, talks about recently selling their Cambria home in under a month alluding to the property in that area being hot as of late. My initial fear was that they sold their winery property to the bank but it turns out that hasn't been confirmed.

Luckily the location of the proposed data center is above the escarpment and not what most would consider a wine grape suitable piece of land. It's actually a corn field and we sure have enough of those in these parts. The tax contribution of such a company would boost revenue for Cambria and the addition of jobs to the area is looked at as positive by most so far. As long as they aren't buying up wine grape suitable properties for corporations I guess there's nothing wrong with that, but there's bound to be some opposition, especially if you are the bank's new neighbor.