Vintages New Release Collection –June 7, 2025

LOCAL TALENT

For wine made in Niagara, brand (the who behind the wine) remains critical to consumer confidence. People find a wine they like by a particular producer and so they return to that producer, but as the Niagara wine region and industry have matured, customers are increasingly thinking in terms of the appellation when purchasing their wines. It’s a mark of a wine region’s success when place takes precedence, and place in Niagara is becoming increasingly clear. Producers, local press, and we here at Vintages have stressed an understanding of what to expect from the bottle when you see appellations such as Niagara Peninsula, Niagara Escarpment or Niagara-on-

the-Lake; and sub-appellations like Beamsville Bench, Twenty Mile Bench or Four Mile Creek. Bachelder is inviting us to go even further and think, as they do in Burgundy, in terms of specific vineyards like York, Kirby, Foxcroft and Saunders. Bachelder’s deep-dive exploration of Niagara’s unique terroirs, which he undertakes alongside his wife, Mary Delaney-Bachelder, has earned him international recognition. Modelling his approach on the template established in Burgundy centuries ago, Bachelder has been painstakingly mapping the entire Niagara wine region, revealing its varied, complex terroirs through

his Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Gamay cru-quality, single-vineyard expressions. Barrels that just miss the mark for these top-flight wines are declassified and included within Bachelder’s multi-site Villages wines, which are themselves exquisite, refined, authentic revelations of Niagara. “The intent is to make pure, subtle, suavely textured wines that sing lightly and clearly of their vineyard origins, with as little makeup as possible – wines that are finely perfumed and tightly wound, offering the classic refined fruit and textured minerality of the delicate silt, clay and dolomitic limestone-laced ancient lakebed

24 VINTAGES