This is the first episode of Spill the Wine that doesn’t include a wine tasting! The conversation Andrea Morris had with Thomas Bacherlder – owner/winemaker of Bachelder Estates was so interesting it needed a full episode to itself. Thomas’ journey as a winemaker began in Montreal, then led to Burgundy, Oregon and finally, Beamsville, which has the climate and terroir for making the Burgundy style wines he loves– Pinot Noir and Chardonnay (and Gamay too!)

You will learn about the difference between Domaine and Chateau wineries, what “mapping” a region means, and the terroir differences between the Bench and Niagara wine regions. Thomas also explains elevage, the aging of wine in barrels and goes into detail about the effects both old and new barrels have on the taste of wine. He even provides some fun ideas to help you plan a trip to the Bench wine region. You will DEFINITELY learn a lot about winemaking from this episode.

Produced by Lukas Sluzar. Recorded January 29, 2025

Show notes: Bachelder : www.bachelderniagara.com

🍷 This week, host Andrea Morris sits down for a cellar-deep conversation with one of Niagara’s premier winemakers, Thomas Bachelder. If you’ve ever wondered what really makes Ontario’s wine region so special, this episode is a must-listen.

Inside This Episode:

• Terroir, Terroir, Terroir: Thomas breaks down the French concept of place and how even Niagara’s tiniest vineyard plots—like those famous tomatoes of Leamington—can produce grapes with distinct personalities.
• From Québec to Burgundy to Niagara: Hear Thomas trace his fascinating global winemaking journey, including the roles of Burgundy, Oregon, and why he’s passionate about Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Gamay Noir.
• The Art of NOT Growing Grapes: That’s right—Thomas explains why he’s chosen to become a ‘micro-negociant.’ Instead of farming his own grapes, he seeks out the very best fruit from incredible growers across the Niagara Peninsula to create site-specific wines.
• Niagara’s Wine Map Is Still Being Drawn: Unlike Europe, our region hasn’t figured out exactly “what grows best where.” Thomas and Andrea discuss how local wineries are pioneering distinct expressions and slowly uncovering the true magic of our soils.
• The Barrel Dance: Ever wondered about the importance of wine barrels? Discover their role in aging, flavor, and how Thomas keeps each vineyard’s story alive from vintage to vintage.
• Explore Like a Local: The duo encourages everyone—even those with little wine knowledge—to get out here, taste, and find your favorite spot. Andrea reminds us: “There’s no right or wrong answer—just bring your palate and curiosity!”

Why Should You Listen?

You’ll hear practical tips for exploring Niagara’s wine country, how to start your own cellar (even if it’s just a cardboard box under your table), and why supporting local restaurants and wineries makes our whole community stronger. This episode is a love letter to Ontario wine and an invitation to come taste for yourself.

What’s Next?

Stay tuned for Part 2, where Andrea and Thomas get into the glass for a guided tasting of Bachelder’s stunning single-vineyard wines—so you can sip along at home.

Andrea Morris [00:00:00]:
Hi, friends, I’m Andrea Morris, and welcome to another episode of Spill the Wine, our podcast that is obviously about wine, but it’s also about demystifying some of the preconceptions that wine is pretentious and that you have to know a lot about it in order to enjoy it. And also, this is my love letter to the Ontario wine region, because I think we have spectacular wines, and I hope that all of you will come out here and experience that someday. Today this may be our first two part episode, and I’m really hoping that it is. I am talking with one of the premier winemakers in the Niagara region, Mr. Thomas Bochelder.

Thomas Bachelder [00:00:39]:
Hello.

Andrea Morris [00:00:40]:
Hello, Thomas. Thank you so much for being here. Thomas is not only a winemaker for his own winery, the Batcave Bochelder Estates, but he also has consulted with winemakers and made wine in a number of different wineries in the region. So. So I’m really, really, really excited to talk with you about your take on winemaking and your approach to the whole. The whole thing. So, first of all, you’re very terroir oriented, correct?

Thomas Bachelder [00:01:06]:
Right, yeah. Terroir is a French word that, you know, basically means sense of place. So if you like, I think most people in southern Ontario know that great tomatoes come down from Leamington Way, and Hines used to be there, and Hunt still is, and, you know, lots of great tomato processing places, these fabulous local tomatoes. Other people will tell you, well, it’s good down in Leamington, but my tomatoes from my garden are better. And it’s the same way with grapes. So a sense of place, the idea that where you grow the grapes makes a different tasting wine, has fascinated me since I. Before I went to wine school.

Andrea Morris [00:01:46]:
Where did you go to wine school?

Thomas Bachelder [00:01:47]:
Well, I’m from Quebec, so my family had a couple of dairy farms outside of Montreal. Montreal and back there, depending on who you talk to, we were Bachelder with an accent on the third syllable, or bachelder on the first, like, batch of wine. But Quebec’s a real mixed place between French and English. So we all grew up with our brains, half French and half English. And so when I wanted to start making wine, the idea was to come back and work in Quebec and try to find that microclimate. Well, that was 1993. We got out of school, we went over to France, to Burgundy, because I loved Pinot Noir that evolved in Burgundy, but so did Chardonnay and Gamay Noir, which is the grape of Beaujolais. And when I came back from wine school and looking at living in Quebec.

Thomas Bachelder [00:02:40]:
And we were trying to find there’s a region around Dunham in the Montorgie, and there’s a region higher in the mountains, the. That you can towards in the Appalachians, that you can make wine. But basically, I got a job right away in Oregon, and that’s just one of those curveballs that life throws you. Oregon focuses on Pinot Noir. After that, that led back to France, to Burgundy, to a job making Chardonnay and Pinot in Meursault, a little village that is known for its great Chardonnay terroirs. So I went back to Oregon after that and I say I. But it was always Mary and I, and then we had our kids, and the kids were really young. We went back to Oregon and we were working for a place called Lemelson Vineyards, doing only Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

Thomas Bachelder [00:03:28]:
And we got a call to come do a startup here in Niagara. And we’re like our own country. Like, who’s making Pinot Noir back there? And this is 2003, and there weren’t many people like Carl Kaiser of Ines. Still, Carl Kaiser of Inniskillen didn’t just love ice wine. He did a lot of Pinot Noir. He loved it. And so did the Basque family at Chateau de Charmes, two of the early pioneers. But since then, of course, when we moved here in 03, Malavoir had started doing Pinot and Creekside had started doing Pinot.

Thomas Bachelder [00:04:00]:
And then Maury Tawes came in at Taws Winery, then Hidden Bench, and Harold Teal and all these people came up around the same time. So I moved here with Mary and the young kids to start a thing called the Closure Ardennes, which is just down the road here from the Bat Cave. And in the old Angel Gate Winery, they took it over and they’re expanding it in the years to come. So that’s a beautiful thing. But we started Batchelder here in about 2009, and we’ve been going ever since, making only the Burgundian grapes, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Gamay Noir. And the idea is behind that is you can make wine whatever way you want to make wine, but if you make less grape types, then you can make more single plots of them and find out what those plots taste like. If you want to make every grape known to man and plant it in the ground beside your winery and have 40 acres, or 100 acres, basically, or 50 hectares, right. A hectare is 2.5 acres.

Thomas Bachelder [00:05:06]:
But the point is, if you want to make a lot of different grape types, then you’re making varietal wines, which means it’s one variety, one wine that’s very interesting. And you can say, this is my Riesling, this is my Cabernet Franc, this is my Pinot Noir, this is my Chardonnay, this is my Gamay Noir, this is my Sau Blanc, my Merlot, blah, blah, blah. And that’s very interesting. And it’s. The world needs that. But other producers, like minded producers, like Lecloud, like Cloudsley, like Creekside, like again, I mentioned Cave Springs and Hidden Bench and Malivoir and Taws, all those folks, Westcott, all these folks up on the bench, they’re tending to self choose, self determine which grape types to work with. Work with fewer grape types and more different sites. So trying to nurse out the sense of place or the terroir of those sites.

Andrea Morris [00:06:04]:
Now you grow your own grapes here.

Thomas Bachelder [00:06:06]:
We grow zero grapes.

Andrea Morris [00:06:07]:
You grow zero grapes.

Thomas Bachelder [00:06:08]:
Okay, that’s a good thing. I love talking about that, you know, to explain why we don’t grow any grapes, I want to tell you a little bit about Burgundy in France. In Burgundy, if you have a small house that makes wine, so a small family could be a man and women, two women, two men, any combination. A father and son, a father and daughter, mother and son. If you have a small family making wine using its own grapes, that’s called the domain in Burgundy. And so you’d be a domain of 6 hectares, which is 15 acres, or you could be a domain that is a little bigger than that, but most of them are very small. So that’s why they call it a house or a domain. In Bordeaux, things are a little more grand.

Thomas Bachelder [00:06:51]:
That’s over near the Atlantic. They call it a chateau, and they usually have a big building, but not always. But Burgundy is in eastern France and it’s just below Dijon, where the mustard comes from, below Paris. And they grow Pinot Noir and Chardonnay and Gamay Noir there. And these domains all go around making 100% domain wine or estate wine in English. But the negociants, they’re buy in grapes, and they are bigger houses that buy in a bunch of grapes from everywhere and have a bigger offering. In between the two is something called micro Negos. If you want to work with different plots of wine, but you don’t have the money to buy all these crazy expensive plots because it’s gotten very expensive in Burgundy and France because it is the birthplace of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, then you just make deals with Farmers to take a couple of rows of this and a couple of rows of that.

Thomas Bachelder [00:07:52]:
So I would say, if you ask me honestly, I think the most noble thing you can do in the wine industry is growing all your own grapes and making your own wine. That’s a real plus. And if you can be organic, all the better. The only downside of growing all your own is that you’re kind of stuck to one area as far as your tractor can drive, because whether you’re organic or not, you’ve got to treat those vines, because the vines can get sick in humid summers or after rain. So you need to keep the grape bunches protected and the leaves protected. And you don’t want to be driving from Niagara on the lake all the way to Hamilton on a little putt putt tractor. So domains or estate wineries tend to have plots of lands that are located around the winery. So if we’re sitting here in Beamsville, you might also have some over in Grimsby or going the other way in Vineland.

Thomas Bachelder [00:08:51]:
But that’s a bit of a hike. It’s 8km on a little tractor, you know. So I think the interesting thing about a Micro Negos or a Micro Negociant is that we can go from one line outside Old Town in Niagara Lake, right up against the Niagara river in the usa, almost to the doors of Hamilton, and work with different growers to try to get the best grapes out of their plots and see what they taste like. And the reason we’re doing that is, well, because Mary and I are Burgundy brainwashed. They brainwashed us into loving the sense of place. It’s like you love it more than the grape. And so you’re looking for the expression of Pinot Noir or Chardonnay, but you’re more looking for the expression of, let’s say we have one here called Wismer Foxcroft. You say that’s a good Wismer Foxcroft this year.

Thomas Bachelder [00:09:45]:
And as soon as you get into talking about place, you talk a lot less about your winemaking. You know, it’s like if you have one or two children, like Mary and I have two girls in their 20s, maybe you talk about your girls a fair bit, but if you have 20 children, well, it’s not so much, look at my kid. Look what they do. You’re more like, well, this one’s doing that and that one’s doing that and that one’s doing that. And you’re not always relating it back to what a good parent or what a good winemaker you are. So I Love having a lot of different terroirs, because I like to think about the terroirs themselves and not so much our part in how we made the wine. The other thing is, the other big reason for doing a lot of different plots of grapes and making specific bespoke wines from each one of them is because Ontario has not been mapped yet. Burgundy’s been mapped.

Thomas Bachelder [00:10:42]:
Bordeaux’s been mapped. So Burgundy’s Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, Bordeaux’s Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. On the Atlantic side of France, you know, Tuscany in Chianti in Italy has been mapped. Germany has been mapped.

Andrea Morris [00:10:54]:
What do you mean by that when you say that’s been mapped?

Thomas Bachelder [00:10:56]:
Well, I mean, like.

Andrea Morris [00:10:57]:
I mean, like, we know about, like, drawing a map, but, yeah, that’s a great.

Thomas Bachelder [00:11:01]:
When you map a region, it’s. You say, this goes better here, this grows better there. You actually make a map of it, and then you make appellation laws which says, this must be planted here. This is Germany. The Mosel. You’ve got to plant Riesling. You can’t plant Zinfandel here. I mean, you could plant Zinfandel there, but you wouldn’t be able to call that anything except wine of Germany.

Thomas Bachelder [00:11:25]:
You wouldn’t be able to say it’s from here. Because they, over the centuries, in Europe, Spain too, you know, they’ve figured out what grows well, where. And in many cases, the grape evolved there. It evolved on those soils. In the New World, we make a conscious choice. We had some grapes that evolved here, but they were the juice grapes, the Concordes, the Niagaras, that made these big, juicy grape juices, but not such good wine. So here we started to hybridize the. Those grapes with local ones that worked pretty well.

Thomas Bachelder [00:12:01]:
But as an industry, as did the Americans, we all decided we had to import the European grapevines that are called vinifera. Vin Vinifera, they make wine. So whether your grape types originally were grown in Spain, France, Italy, or Germany, they evolved over there, not here. And here, it’s a different game. I’ve got a plot of land, what grapes best fit it and make the best wine? Not just the best wine, the most characterful wine that sings of the place it comes from. That’s where we’re in a very adolescent stage in all of Canada and all of the usa. It’s like each state, each province is trying to find out what their patch does. Well, just like I said earlier, Leamington does amazing tomatoes.

Thomas Bachelder [00:12:52]:
We know that. Quebec, where I come from, does Amazing tomatoes because it’s so hot there in the summer. But it’s a much shorter season, so they’ve gotta figure that out than Leamington, you know, in southwest Ontario. So I think here in Niagara, it hasn’t been quite mapped yet. We all know where the towns are, we all know where the vineyards are, but we don’t know exactly where what should be planted in each place. And as a producer does really well with one thing, the next person who comes around and says, hey, look at that, I’m going to do that too. So in the beginning, there was a lot of Riesling here on the bench. And Riesling does fabulously on the bench.

Thomas Bachelder [00:13:32]:
And we make some great Rieslings. But also people move to the bench who were already Burgundy lovers. That’s how we differentiate ourselves from Niagara on the lake, where I also work. Mary and I also get grapes from Niagara Lake. But Niagara Lake’s older. It was established first. You’ve got that beautiful old town, Niagara Lake. You’ve got the parkway and the Niagara River.

Thomas Bachelder [00:13:55]:
You drive down the Niagara Parkway and you’re looking at the usa. It’s magical. Then you go up the escarpment to the Brock Monument and just a little further to Niagara Falls is there. It falls from the escarpment, right. Whereas where we are on the bench, on the same escarpment, although there’s not as big falls around here, we have some small falls, but we have this same limestone that you have over in Burgundy and Italy. And that limestone component makes really interesting European tasting wines. So the bench, which is really a layer of the escarpment, we have a few layers or a few terraces as you go up the escarpment. And whenever there’s a flat terrace, people plant grapes there.

Thomas Bachelder [00:14:39]:
Down on the flatter bits towards the lake, we tend to plant peaches and cherries. But there’s grapes down there too. But the finest, I think grapes come from the bench, if you’re looking to make fine European style wines with a lightness of being. And I think that’s why people gravitated over the last 20, 30 years to the benchmark. Niagara Lake is great. It’s flatter, there’s less limestone, but it’s a little warmer. So you can do more late season grapes there, like Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, the big reds, they love it in Niagara Lake. Great game there too.

Thomas Bachelder [00:15:17]:
But the bench here is a little far from the lake and at an altitude. So the lake, which is warm in September, has trouble warming up the bench. So think things slow down and they’re ripening. And when you slow down and you’re ripening, they stay on the vine a little longer. And mama vine tries to ripen them. And as she does so, she’s giving a sense of place as she pulls on her roots. Give me some. I need more to ripen these little babies.

Thomas Bachelder [00:15:47]:
And so, in other words, if you harvest super early in a warmer place, you’ll get varietal flavor. That’s a nice Pinot. But if you harvest later in a cooler place, while you’re waiting for that ripeness, waiting for it, you get more of the place that you’re on. Because the plant has not only a taproot, it has feeder roots. And those feeder roots are pulling up essential elements and minerals that make the plant healthy, but also make the grapes have a taste. Make the grapes have a taste of that tree plot right there. So that’s what we’re trying to do. Mapping.

Thomas Bachelder [00:16:25]:
You ask the question, like, what’s mapping besides putting the vineyards on a map? And now we said, let’s layer over that. What should be grown where mapping is also writers come along, bloggers come along and start to say, I like the Riesling there. Why is it so good here? And eventually have books written on the subject. Wine articles, right? If you were to go over to Burgundy and you wanted to make wine from a Pinot Noir plot there in Burgundy, you just go to your two neighbors and say, how do I do this? Because they would share the same terroir or the same patch of land as you, and they’d say, well, here’s what I do, and here’s what I do, says the other one. Then you buy their bottles. You can read in books, in any language what their wines taste like and what the monks did all those years ago in Burgundy and why this town tastes like that and that town tastes like that. And so all we’re doing here at Bachelder is we’re trying to make the taste of each plot intelligible to the person who comes to wine, who comes here. So that in the future, instead of saying, when I go down to Niagara, I want to go to Cornerstone, or I want to go to a Creekside or I want to go to Cave Spring, because they’re hot.

Thomas Bachelder [00:17:44]:
Cloudsley’s hot. Where, yes, everybody wants to be hot. But the other thing is, how about this? I want to go to Beamsville because I think the Chardonnay is great in Beamsville. I like Niagara on the lake, I like Jordan, and Vineland. But the ones for Beamsville just knock me on my butt. That’s the kind of thing we hope happens. And there’s so many different terroirs here. We don’t care if somebody likes being built better than Niagara Lake or likes Niagara Lake better than Jordan.

Thomas Bachelder [00:18:11]:
What we care about is people know what they like. And you don’t have to have any learning for that. You just have to get your butt down here and taste.

Andrea Morris [00:18:18]:
Exactly.

Thomas Bachelder [00:18:19]:
You’ll figure it out pretty quick.

Andrea Morris [00:18:20]:
That’s the only way you’re going to find out.

Thomas Bachelder [00:18:22]:
Yeah, for sure.

Andrea Morris [00:18:23]:
And as I always say when I’m doing my tastings, it’s that we all have different palates. So what my palate is what’s pleasing to my palate might not be the same to yours. So there’s no right or wrong answer.

Thomas Bachelder [00:18:35]:
I think you’re exactly right. And I think when we first started to do, we, the industry started to do really interesting wines and people were noticing us internationally. We do a lot of. At dinner parties, we do a lot of, hey, I’m going to sneak this Canadian wine into a French wine tasting, which is fun. And you can do that in California wine tasting whatever you want. Or after three wines you trumpet to your guests, this is the best Canadian wine or the best Niagara wine. Well, maybe it fails and maybe it doesn’t fail, but I think we’re beyond that now. What you might want to do now is grab a wine from Vineland and grab the same variety from Beamsville and put them on the table.

Thomas Bachelder [00:19:20]:
And don’t give people a choice whether to like France better or Canada then better. Just say, hey, what talks to you. And another thing you can do is don’t say which one is better. Just say which one’s speaking to you tonight. Because on your birthday, on Christmas, on your wedding anniversary, on some it might taste different with different friends, you know, so just what’s speaking to you today? And if people can’t even come up with an answer for that, to demystify it, I say, well, guess what? Your Uncle George has just dropped a case at home for you to put it in your garage or your basement and cellar. There’s 12 bottles. They have to be the same thing. He did it for you.

Thomas Bachelder [00:19:58]:
I use Uncle George cause he was one of my favorite uncles and he did that kind of thing for me. But it was bikes, not wine bicycles, not Harley’s. Anyway, so what happens is if you give people the thought of 12 free wines in their cellar or in their kitchen, then they can come up with which one they’d like to follow. And it’s not our business whether they drink those 12 bottles in one week or they have one a year, or they save them and drink them on their birthdays. But if you just take any interest in wine and follow a wine more than once, you’ll see how it evolves. And do you like it better when it gets a little older? And when it gets a little older, do you like it better than the other one that you thought you liked better? So these are the things I think people just need to get down here. And we’ve got so much tourism down here now. But I and Mary would like to be more focused on what grows, well, where and less who got a big score in the latest Globe and Mail review or Toronto Star review.

Thomas Bachelder [00:21:01]:
I like a lot more the idea, like, okay, honey, let’s go down and camp out on Niagara Lake and spend a few days there, and next summer we’ll be in Jordan. Or that’s for people who are from far away. People who are from Burlington or the Hammer or Ottawa or Toronto or Montreal can come more often. Or Buffalo, you know, or Ohio. We get a lot of guests here from Ohio in Niagara. So I think it’s happening and it’s happening quickly. France took a thousand years, but France didn’t have the Internet. Internet, your blog, TripAdvisor, all these things.

Thomas Bachelder [00:21:35]:
Like, you’ll be sitting, tasting wine with someone and you’ll say, like, how did you hear about us? Like, you’re from Virginia. And I mean, it’s not a big percentage, but it happens many times in a summer. And they’ll say, well, you know, Trip Advisor said me, TripAdvisor said I should go eat at Odd Bird in St. Catharines or Treadwell in Niagara Lake, or Garrison House. And I went there and they said, oh, go visit Bachelder. They’ll teach you about what’s happening, you know, across the peninsula. Of course, when people get here, we don’t teach them anything. When we say, here they are, they’re from four different places.

Thomas Bachelder [00:22:12]:
You talk to me and we’ll tell you. Then you start an exchange.

Andrea Morris [00:22:15]:
Right, right. Yeah.

Thomas Bachelder [00:22:16]:
And that. That’s why right here we do things by only by rendezvous. You have to book a meeting on the Internet because we want to be here, have somebody really knowledgeable, interacting. So we take four to six people at once. Well, you’ve been here.

Andrea Morris [00:22:31]:
I have, yes.

Thomas Bachelder [00:22:32]:
Yeah, yeah. And they took care of you. I wasn’t there that day, but they sat down.

Andrea Morris [00:22:35]:
It was fantastic. We Were here for two and a half hours.

Thomas Bachelder [00:22:38]:
Uh oh, super geek.

Andrea Morris [00:22:43]:
We couldn’t leave because your wines are so amazing. But, you know, and we were looking at the map, you know, and talking about all the places that you picked your grapes from. And I’m interested to know, like, when you’re that process, when you go and go to these vineyards and you say, like, I’m going to use that grape. Have you. Are you familiar with it beforehand or have you heard from someone else or in your. Like, how do you go, this is the grape. I want that. I know I’m going to make a wine from that.

Thomas Bachelder [00:23:10]:
Well, I think that when I moved here for the Clos Jordan. That’s a great question. The Clos Jourdain’s in Jordan, and it’s part of the 20 mile bench. Appalachian. And 20 mile bench is named for being 20 miles from Niagara Falls. They did, you know, Six Mile Creek, Twelve Mile Creek, 20, 16 mile, 20 mile, right up to Fifty Mile Creek. They named those before kilometers were even thought of over here. Right.

Thomas Bachelder [00:23:38]:
So we still have those miles grandfathered in. So I think the closure of Dan project started with Enniskillen in the beginning because Ineskillen was doing great Pinot Noir down on Niagara Lake. And the owners, Donald Trigg and Alan Jackson of Vincore, who owned Le Clo at the time, now it’s Arterra. But they said we should plant for the Clos Jourdain in Jordan because it’s on a limestone bench. There’s limestone in Burgundy. We’re going to plant the Burgundian grapes on a limestone bench. We’re going to do that in Jordan because the lands on the bench there are planted to soya and corn. Like, what a waste.

Thomas Bachelder [00:24:20]:
And so from. From the point of view of growing Pinot Noir, it’s a waste. Not from corn’s point of view. It’s great to grow corn there, but, you know, it’s like. So we did that for eight years, nine years, Mary and I and a bunch of folks who worked with us, Clojordan. And when we went off on our own, it was my favorite place in the peninsula and still is. But right next door across 20 Mile Creek and the little falls that are called Ball’s Falls, that, you know, right across that creek is the same Appalachian 20 mile bench and it’s Vineland. And so Bachelder started grabbing a lot of vineyards from there.

Thomas Bachelder [00:24:58]:
And we worked hard to understand how Vineland was different. And in fact, it is different. I’d like to see Vineland called the Vineland Bench, and Jordan be the Jordan Bench instead of both the 20 mile bench, because you can’t find 20 mile on a map. Okay. So as I learned more about Jordan and Vineland, I realized Beamsville is a little closer to the lake. The bench of Beamsville is a little closer to Lake, a little warmer, but still really, really cool. Makes cool flavors. Branched out to Niagara Lake after that, found some really old vines.

Thomas Bachelder [00:25:32]:
Niagara Lake has the oldest vines. So old vines, even though Niagara’s a little hotter, the older vines have a big root system, and they kind of buffer out those hot years and those wet years. They’re pretty stable. Old vines are. So I learned bit by bit, and as we did more single vineyards, people would come to us and say, hey, my dad has. My dad has a plot of vines. These Gamay. Would you like to try them? You know, and if we had space, we would.

Thomas Bachelder [00:26:00]:
Or we would search after certain vineyards that we tasted from other people who made wine from them and who abandoned working with them. We’re like, hey, can we get in? So slowly we started to understand things. So. But, I mean, the dichotomy still remains of Niagara on the lake was the first planted and has the oldest vines. The Bench here, or the Niagara Escarpment west of St. Catharines, has more Burgundian grapes and tends to have been planted 99 and on. Not 70s and on, but 99 and on.

Andrea Morris [00:26:35]:
Who’s got the oldest grapes on the bench?

Thomas Bachelder [00:26:38]:
I think probably Daniel Lenko. And a Harold Seal of Hidden Bench has some old vines that he bought off, you know, somebody else. 30 bench is a great winery that belongs to Peller, that used to belong to four individuals. And they have some pretty old vines there, too, but they’re not really, really old. Most of them are mid-90s. Most have been planted in the 2000s, frankly. So bench is a great place to grow grapes, especially ones of finesse, perfumed wines of finesse. If that attracts you, the bench is the place if you want richer wines.

Thomas Bachelder [00:27:15]:
Niagara Lake might be better, or the lakeshore west of St. Catharines. But, you know, one of the things to think of is when you’re coming to visit us from Montreal, from Ottawa, you know, from Kingston, Toronto, or from points west like Windsor. When you drive in to the Niagara Peninsula and you’re coming down the qew, the escarpment is on your right, and it stays on your right, right till it crosses the Niagara river and it becomes the USA Escarpment, right Stateside. So that is like A marker for the region. Just keep your eye on the escarpment and you stay on the qew. You’ll know which parts of the escarpment come right out to the highway almost. You’re like, that’s close.

Thomas Bachelder [00:27:58]:
Well, that’s Grimsby. And by the time you get to outside of St. Catharines, you can’t even see the escarpment because it pulls back so far. And then once you get over towards Niagara Lake, the escarpment is visible again at St. David’s so there’s so many different places. You can grow grapes here on the flatter bits with sandy soils, which we call peach soils, because peaches do well there or on the escarpment or the bench, where you have a little more limestone and clay and wines with a little less color but a lot more finesse and perfume. These are generalizations, right? You can find many different things. The other thing that happened here is we talk a lot about our glacial heritage, which is impossible to really understand.

Thomas Bachelder [00:28:41]:
When the five Great Lakes were basically one, and then they started to shrink, and the escarpment here was the ancient seashore. And now it’s this little mountain that sticks out above the current. Seashore or lakeshore, Right? So you have this. The curve of the escarpment kind of follows the curve of the lake, but not always. So that gives even more variables, as well as erosion and altitude. So, honestly, you can dig soil pits, but when you plant, you don’t know what the hell it’s going to taste like. You know it’s going to work because your neighbor’s one works. But it’s not only the glaciers.

Thomas Bachelder [00:29:27]:
It’s all the water flow we got every year that comes down from the escarpment and flows out to the lake in multiple creeks. And when those creeks were a little wider, they really messed with the land on both sides of the creek or in flood times. So that’s why we’ve got so many different places or terroirs or parcels. So it’s a fascinating place to work. So Burgundy’s exciting work there, and Oregon’s exciting. And of course, they’re better known. We’re unknown, and we’ve got so much to offer because we haven’t even figured out the possibilities here yet, but enough so somebody like you is doing a podcast. It’s a good sign for the future.

Andrea Morris [00:30:09]:
Well, I happen to be a big wine fan and a big fan of the wine in this region. And it’s like you were talking about. You kind of just go and start experimenting and, you know There’s a beautiful little book that comes out every year of the wineries. And you just open that up, you see a map, and you just go, I’ve never been to this one. I’m going to go visit it.

Thomas Bachelder [00:30:27]:
I think that’s a great way to go. And I would add to that, if that person decides after two or three wineries that they’re really a Riesling person, I think, great. So let that be your marker, not just how what score the wine got. I like a dry Riesling. Okay. I’m going to go to Cave Springs. Oh, but Vineland Estate makes a lot of Riesling, too. I’ll go there.

Thomas Bachelder [00:30:48]:
And you can say at the beginning, you say stuff like, I like B better than A. That’s fine. And you still say it, you still say it later on in life. But then you start thinking, I wonder if that’s because where A is grown is different from where B is grown. Now, the problem with that is it is where you want to go. But when people are making the effort to do a single vineyard, instead of just blending everything together to make the best taste, it’s going to cost more money. There’s going to be a sorting table involved, and there’s going to be wild yeast involved, which is harder to manage, and there’s going to be long elevage. Elevage, or aging of the wine and barrel is a passive event, like you watching things happen.

Thomas Bachelder [00:31:33]:
You’re tasting them, you’re testing them at the lab, you’re making sure nothing goes wrong. But really, you’re not intervening much. You’re wanting them to become their best possible selves. And that’s what the husbandry is of doing single vineyards. Now, at the end, when we’ve got all these single vineyards and we’re thinking about them and saying, right, well, I’ve got 10 barrels of this Wismer Park Pinot Noir. Why don’t I just take the six best barrels that really focus in on that Wismer park flavor, whatever it is, and let’s take the other four barrels and put them into a blend of the bench around Vineland and Beamsville, which is what we do. We call it Les Villages. So that blend would come out at less money and you’d get the flavor of the bench.

Thomas Bachelder [00:32:28]:
You get everything done the same way, same aging. But the single vineyard would have been purified by using just the barrels that are most likely like itself. The barrels all taste slightly different, and I’m not just saying wood. It’s much more about the oxygenated characters that help the wine slightly breathe in its long 18 to 20 months in barrel. And as the wine breathes, you know, it evaporates and it gets a little more concentrated and starts to taste a little more like Wismer park and a little less like just Pinot Noir. And that’s the Holy Grail hunt we’re all on to make wines with a sense of place.

Andrea Morris [00:33:10]:
Does a barrel ever, like, outgrow itself? Like, is there a time when you’re like, I can’t use this barrel anymore because it’s just not giving me the flavors that I want?

Thomas Bachelder [00:33:20]:
I think barrels could last indefinitely. And to be truthful, I think as long as they’re clean, you can use them. But the older they get, the older a barrel gets, the more its pores are just clogged with the old wines from the past, and so it doesn’t breathe so much anymore. And when barrels are 10 years old, they barely taste like they’ve had any oxygenation. Like, you can imagine a wine that sits for 20 months in a steel tank topped up right to the top. It doesn’t age real fast. So neither do wines that are in a very, very old barrel or a very big old barrel. Like, the larger the barrel, which we also call foudre, but those or puncheons, the larger the barrel, the slower the aging.

Thomas Bachelder [00:34:10]:
Just like if you have a bottle of wine, if you have a magnum, which is a big bottle of wine that ages slower, wine ages slower in bulk than it does divide it up. So these barrels are really important to us. And if you’re growing and you need more barrels, then you don’t throw your old barrels out if they’re clean. But you need a certain amount of new barrels, because the new barrels, like that one right over there with the bright black metal bands and the very light colored wood, they breathe like maniacs. Not enough to make a wine oxidative. Oxidative is when you leave a glass three days on your counter and you go, ooh, that smells like port or something like that, or sherry, like with a white wine. But it’s not enough to oxidize a wine, but it is enough to make them breathe and have more richness. So the new barrels have the more rich wines, and the really old barrels have the very pure, linear and fresh wines, but not quite as much volume.

Thomas Bachelder [00:35:13]:
So that’s why new barrels for winemakers are a bit of a drug, because they bring breadth and width and harmony to your wine. Problem is, sometimes people get a little too stuck on that. And you say, hey, this tastes like a plank, this wine. Well, that’s because they have 50% new in it, you know, and that vineyard couldn’t support it. There are wines in the world that come from plots that are so concentrated that you could pour them in a new barrel, and you can’t even taste the barrel because those wines are so concentrated. But that’s not really what happens most of the time. Most of the time, you want to have just enough new barrels to renew your fleet, just as if. Imagine if you owned a taxi company or a rental car company.

Thomas Bachelder [00:35:58]:
You don’t want to have all used cars. That’d be a really bad summer with all the tourists coming. Right. Always in the garage and stuff, fixing them up. I think that’s a good metaphor, because you don’t want to focus on the fact of how many new barrels you have, but you want to have some and keep some youth coming into your cellar.

Andrea Morris [00:36:17]:
So they keep like, yeah, yeah. Giving yourself that idea that you can use some of the old barrels, bring in the new, and kind of like, integrate them.

Thomas Bachelder [00:36:25]:
Yes. And one of the big secrets to single vineyard making is you try to use the same used barrels for the same plot every year. Because what’s in the staves, what has been dissolved in the staves over the years, does affect what’s the wine. And so it does. It’s not just the wood that affects it or the oxygen, but also the wine that was in it before. It’s crazy, but it’s true. And so I learned that over in Meursault, keep the same set of barrels for the same little plot of vines, which is even crazier because we age our wines for 20 months. So that means we.

Thomas Bachelder [00:37:01]:
We’ve got to have two sets of whismer park barrels. The logistics are incredible. Until you’ve done it twice. Then you’re like, I can do this. Because you’ve done it. Those are 24s and the other seller, 23s, easy. And when those 23s are emptied in a couple of months and we bottle them, they’ll become 25 barrels with a couple of new ones. It’s pretty simple.

Thomas Bachelder [00:37:22]:
But getting that first rotation going, oh, boy. It’s like opening a restaurant. And are people going to come? You know, it’s like, same kind of thing. You’ve got to. You’ve got to make it work in the restaurant business. Summer and winter, it’s got to work.

Andrea Morris [00:37:37]:
So you do the same with the wine. So, like, when you get a new barrel, it’s kind of like, introducing yourself to that barrel and going, what are you about?

Thomas Bachelder [00:37:44]:
Oh, for sure.

Andrea Morris [00:37:44]:
What is the wine going to be about with you?

Thomas Bachelder [00:37:46]:
And remember what I told you about we love to make a village blend or a village blend. They do that in France, too. They. They’d be like, in terms of Beamsville, where we’re sitting in France, you’d say, do you have any single vineyards from Beamsville? Yes, we’d say, yes, we have Saunders Vineyards from Beamsville. And they’d say, but do you make village wine? Yes, I make a wine just named Beamsville. Over in France. They’d call it a different name. Meursault would be a Chardonnay, and Pommard would be another village that does Pinot.

Thomas Bachelder [00:38:17]:
They name it by the village, but the village is more the entry level. With us, it’s a couple of vineyards within the village that are blended together. Can it be delicious? Yes. Can it be more delicious than a single vineyard? Well, you said it earlier, the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You could like that. The blend is maybe more complex than a single vineyard. You could like that. It’s 20 bucks less than a single vineyard.

Thomas Bachelder [00:38:44]:
But certain of these single vineyards, they show themselves, and they’re so particular. You’re like, I’ve got to have that in my cellar. It hooks you in. And again, I just want to say for your listeners, when you come down here and you start to find things you like, a cellar is wherever you put your wine. So if it’s a box turned sideways under the kitchen table, you have a wine cellar. And just start that way and figure out how far your obsession goes.

Andrea Morris [00:39:12]:
And the more you come out here, the more obsessed you will become.

Thomas Bachelder [00:39:16]:
Yeah. Oh, yeah. And, you know, one thing I learned in the pandemic, to my great astonishment, when we moved here from Oregon, although, you know, we’re Quebecois, proud Ontarians, proud Canadians, we. We moved here, they said to us when we were selling the first Laclos Jourdan wines or the lcbo, they said, never forget that Niagara will be your biggest market. And we’re like, no. Like, we were looking around here 20 years ago. We’re looking like, okay, there’s a couple of lcbos, not as swish as the Ontario, as the. As the Toronto lcbos or the Oakville LCBOs or the Ottawa ones.

Thomas Bachelder [00:39:54]:
So how are you going to sell a lot of wine here? But when you think of all the tourists coming to your winery, to those lcbos and to all the restaurants, a lot of tourists come to the wineries. Because they’ve had the wine in a restaurant. A lot of wine is drunk in the restaurants. And then people come and they say, you know, ah, like, I really want to get to that Cloudsley place. But then what happens is on that particular trip, they went left and they went to another winery instead. They ran out of time and they go to the LCBO and they buy the Cloudsley wine before they leave and they say, next time I get it, but I’m taking four bottles home. So as producers, as a wine industry, we have no idea how the restaurants, the LCBOs and the wineries all work to get the region known. We know it’s a combo of the three and we know.

Thomas Bachelder [00:40:48]:
But it’s not as simple as people coming to wineries as tourists. It’s way more complex than that. And we all need each other. We need super, super strong restaurants seen here that’s using. We need those restaurants to be using local products and local wines. And then we have a real region, you know, as in tandem.

Andrea Morris [00:41:08]:
Exactly. I mean, I’m always. I’m always slightly annoyed when I go to a restaurant in the area that doesn’t have a Niagara wine or not even, or has Niagara on the Lake wines, but not Beamsville wines. It’s like we should be supporting our own.

Thomas Bachelder [00:41:23]:
Yeah, we have to. It’s fun to have wines from away, and it’s fun to have wines. Wines from here, but you have to have wines from here if this region is going to build. Make your own choice after how many are from away? I have nothing against it. I mean, I go to. We’re really well served by the LCBO in that we have lots of wines from around the planet and winemakers here and viticulturalists here, they can learn how their wines might taste by tasting similar varieties from around the world on different terroirs, of course. And I think it’s pleasant in wine to taste different things, but there’s a lot of mining to be done here. You come down here as a tourist and just mine the different towns for what they do.

Thomas Bachelder [00:42:03]:
Well, make up your own and become your own expert, you know, And I know a lot of people don’t like the sound of the word expert, but if you visit Niagara five times and buy a little wine each time, doesn’t have to be a lot. You start to throw some dinner parties and people will say to you, man, how do you know that you know that Chardonnay is so good from Jordan? It’s like, well, I visited five times and they’re looking at you with awe, and you say, hey, get off your butt and take a vacation there. You don’t always have to go to Europe, you know.

Andrea Morris [00:42:33]:
Exactly.

Thomas Bachelder [00:42:33]:
You could do wine country here. So in the pandemic, what happened? Two things happened that shocked me. One was that we all started delivering our own wine because people were ordering online. It was the only thing you could do. And we would be dropping them off on people’s doorstep. And we were shocked at how much wine we sold in Niagara. But Burlington and, you know, the Hammer, Hamilton and the next couple of towns over, Oakville, they were buying the most, meaning per capita. Toronto buys a ton of wine, and we’re making tons, tons of deliveries.

Thomas Bachelder [00:43:11]:
But we thought it was out of proportion to the population. The wine sales we were getting from Burlington and Oakville. And there’s a French term that’s appartenance. You know, you feel a belonging, like in Toronto or Montreal. If you want to come to Niagara, you’re like, okay, we got to make a plan. We got to have a babysitter. Are we going to stay overnight? We need a hotel. Burlington can go.

Thomas Bachelder [00:43:36]:
It’s one o’ clock on a Saturday. Let’s just nip down one. Winning. Okay, two. We’ll do two. And we’ll eat out. No, no, no. We’ll come back for pizza.

Thomas Bachelder [00:43:43]:
You have that immediacy, and so you adopt it as your own, and that is pretty cool. And we really see that. The other thing we learned in the pandemic was that Quebecois especially started to change their ways of visiting. We saw a lot of this before. The Quebecois family, who loved wine, would stop in Prince Edward county, which is between, you know, on Lake Ontario, between Kingston and Toronto, and makes really good wine there, too. So pec, as we call it. They have one night there. They’d go out to dinner.

Thomas Bachelder [00:44:19]:
They’d come to Niagara Saturday morning, try to visit five wineries and say, where should we eat tonight? And I’m like. Or Mary would be like, it’s July. You want to go to Treadwell’s? You had to book a week ago. Yeah, you know, it’s like a wine region. You can’t just come and say, what’s the best restaurant? So what happened was, in the pandemic, people started bringing their Airstreams with bikes on the back, their kids bikes or their own bikes and their golf sets, and they spend 10 days here golfing outside. It was a healthy thing to do, being on a bike. And this is like later in Covid, when most people were vaccinated and stuff. And so what happened was people started to make it really a vacation destination that was wasn’t just based on Niagara Falls and the Old Town.

Thomas Bachelder [00:45:03]:
There’s nothing wrong with that. Of course, those people also visited Niagara Falls and Old Town, Niagara Lake, but they also had enough time here that we could say, listen, bike through the vineyards, that’s great. But if you bike up over the escarpment, there’s way less cars. It’s beautiful country. And you can finish in Lake Erie, which is shallower. I mean, the peninsula is only, you know, 40 kilometers wide. Lake Erie is shallower. The water’s warmer, so you can go for a swim there.

Thomas Bachelder [00:45:32]:
And people are like, oh, my God, I could stay on Lake erie and commute 20 minutes to Niagara every day to do a winery. So all these different ideas are happening because people are spending more time here, and there’s lots more ideas like that to be discovered. Airbnb is in the middle of a soya field up there. There’s lots of those. So you don’t have to just do the tried and true tourism.

Andrea Morris [00:45:54]:
Exactly. So, you know, we’ve been talking so much about the Terrar and about winemaking and the ideas, so I think that what we should do is wrap up this episode and then start episode two, where we actually taste some of your fabulous wines.

Thomas Bachelder [00:46:12]:
Okay, well, we’re gonna have to go offline for a bit so you can make 27 single vineyards. You’re have to narrow them down if you’re going to be able to talk like this.

Andrea Morris [00:46:22]:
Okay, listener, we are going to do just that. That. So we would like to say thank you very much, Thomas, for all of your insight in this episode. I have learned. I personally have learned so much, and I’m sure the listener has as well, and it’s going to make people really want to come down here and visit the area. So this is episode one of Bachelder batch of wine. Bachelder. Bachelder.

Andrea Morris [00:46:46]:
I could like, I want to say the German way. So this wraps up this particular episode of Spill the Wine. Be sure to check us out on Instagram, Spill the winepodcast and like and follow us. But most importantly, be sure to tell your friends and tell your enemies. Tell everybody you know to listen.

Thomas Bachelder [00:47:18]:
Tell those you tolerate on.

Andrea Morris [00:47:20]:
Yeah, tell, tell, you know what, tell your babysitter. I don’t know. Tell anybody that you know to listen to this podcast and become a fan of the Niagara wines. So we will say farewell for this episode and be back with our wine tasting in part two.