Generally speaking, organic wines are cleaner tasting than non-organic. How many dead wines do we encounter? Probably too many. Spray and spray and eventually kill the soil. God help you if you have any vegetation growing between rows of vines. Why would you want to have sheep munching on the growth between the vines? Forget sheep poop as a fertilizer when we have chemicalized fertilizer pellets? Dead wine has little vibrancy and almost no taste but so much cheaper to produce than organic.
Can a Frogpond Farm 2019 Organic Gamay Noir from Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario be deserving of a round of applause?
Aroma: Vibrant cherry, raspberry, strawberry and forgive me for saying this very clean and pure.
Palate: Light, perhaps too light, bits and flecks of cherry, strawberry and raspberry streaming by like on a colonoscopy monitor. Aaargh!!! Nasty acidity kills the appeal of this wine. Should I have known better when the LCBO Vintages catalogue (17Feb2024) described in part the wine as “tangy”. Tangy perhaps a polite excuse for fierce acidity reminiscent of a Vinho Verde white or dare I say an oxidized wine? Funny that I recently tasted a Gamay from a god of Niagara winemaking. It had indigenous yeast and was close to a pre-admission to wine heaven according to gurus of this winemaker god. It was, in my opinion (for whatever that is worth) seriously compromised by acidity.
Personality: Leave me alone as I am on an acid trip man! Who needs, cannabis, shrooms or LSD when you have this acidic wine to groove on?
Food Match: Green tomato pasta in late October here in Ontario. This wine will be a fizzy as root beer by then.
Cellarbility: Stay out of your cellar as the acidity of this wine might cause major damage in any Chernobyl spill.
Price: $18.95 CDN (Ontario).
RKS 2024 Wine Rating: 82/100. Wine Align 86.
(Frogpond Farm, 2019 Organic Gamay Noir, VQA Niagara-on-the-Lake, Frogpond Farm, Niagara-on-the-Lake, 750 mL, 12.1%).
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