In part two of Andrea’s interview with Thomas Bachelder – owner/winemaker of Bachelder Estates, we taste some wonderful wines. We start off with comparing Gamay Noir wines from Niagara and Bench vineyards, comparing color, taste and the aromas. During the tasting we learn how the colour of red wine is effected by the volume in the glass.

As we progress to sipping Chardonnays, Thomas shares some insights on the expense of making wines, and the factors like barrel aging, hand picking, the age of the vines and the craftsmanship that can raisethe price of a bottle. And before our tasting of three spectacular Pinot Noirs, Thomas coins a new t-shirt slogan: Great wine elevates humanity! (yes, we are thinking of some Spill the Wine merch!) This episode should really peak your interest in the Bench area wines.

Produced by Lukas Sluzar. Recorded January 29, 2025

Show notes: Bachelder: www.bachelderniagara.com

Wines sampled: 2022 Gamay Noir Kirby, 2022 Gamay Noir Wismer Foxcroft, 2022 Chardonnay

Wismer Foxcroft, 2022 Chardonnay, Hill of Wingfield, 2022 Chardonnay Frontier Block, 2022

Pinot Noir Wismer Parke, 2022 Pinot Noir Wild West End, 2022 Pinot Noir Hanck

Be sure to check out Part Two of our conversation with the extraordinary Thomas Bachelder of Bachelder Winery — a deep dive that will leave you swirling, sniffing, and savoring right alongside us!

🍇 Inside the Tasting Room with Thomas Bachelder

In this episode, Andrea Morris sits down with Thomas Bachelder to taste through his acclaimed Niagara wines, exploring what makes a “wine of place” and diving deep into the signature terroir of Niagara’s Bench and Lake regions. If you missed Part One, hit rewind — but trust us, you’ll want to linger on every sip of Part Two.

Here’s what you’ll find inside:

• Pandemic Tasting Tips: Thomas reveals his clever winetasting hacks using small bottles so you can truly compare and learn from multiple wines at home.
• Gamay Noir Face-Off: We taste two stunning single-vineyard Gamays — Kirby from Four Mile Creek (juicy and lush) vs. Wismer Foxcroft from the Twenty Mile Bench (mineral, perfumed, with a hint of “bloody” ferric edge). Which style will you fall for?
• Chardonnay’s Terroir Symphony: Three beautifully distinct Chardonnays — Foxcroft, Wingfield, and the Frontier Block — each shine with unique aromas (oyster shell, caramel apple, ripe pear). Andrea and Thomas decode minerality, richness, and that elusive sense of place.
• The Pinot Noir Showdown: The grand finale features Pinot Noirs from three side-by-side plots — Wismer Park, Wild West End, and Hank. Prepare for flavors ranging from flinty minerality and cherry pit to earthy “wilderness” notes and silky, fruity balance. Discover why even “Tinkerbell” can show her strength amid the “bruisers.”
• Winemaker Insights: How do geography, soil, and microclimate shape each wine? Thomas illuminates the science, art, and sheer passion behind his single-vineyard approach.

✨ Quotes to Remember

• “Great wines elevate humanity.” (Andrea’s favorite for your next T-shirt!)
• “You can be rich in a few very select areas. For me, it’s wine.” — Thomas Bachelder

🌱 Support Niagara’s Vineyards

This episode is a passionate call to cherish the Niagara escarpment and support local winemakers. As Thomas puts it, “Many, if not all parts of Niagara have great worth as a place to grow grapes… Let’s keep it in vines!”

🍽️ Pairings & Pro Tips

• Gamay with charcuterie and cheese — its crunchier acidity loves “fatty and salty things.”
• Keep a trick up your sleeve: Bring out a Chardonnay after red wine with your cheese course for a truly European finale.

Andrea Morris [00:00:00]:
Hello, friends. I’m Andrea Morris, and welcome back to Spill the Wine, a podcast about wine. This is part two of our episode with Botchelder Winery, and sitting here with Thomas Botchelder, who is a superb winemaker. And we had a really. If you missed episode one, go back and listen to it. And if you listen to it, listen to it again so you really understand about the terrain and about the thought process behind the wines that we are about to drink. I am so excited to actually be tasting your wines with you, because when I came here to the winery, you weren’t here and I tasted with someone else, which was great. Still a fantastic experience.

Andrea Morris [00:00:41]:
But to sit here with you and have you explain these wines is going to be absolutely fantastic.

Thomas Bachelder [00:00:46]:
Wow. Yeah, that’s great. I’m glad to be back on the podcast and really fun that we were talking so passionately last time that we forgot to drink.

Andrea Morris [00:00:56]:
Well, let’s hope we make up for it this time.

Thomas Bachelder [00:00:58]:
You know, in the last episode, I referenced the pandemic, and there’s something I learned big time in the pandemic, which was to have little bottles around. So if you want to save, like, some old Perrier bottles, especially plastic ones, I mean, glass is better for the environment, but plastic bottles are cool in that you can squeeze the air out of them.

Andrea Morris [00:01:24]:
So.

Thomas Bachelder [00:01:25]:
So the idea is, let’s say you wanted to have a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, and you wanted to have an Ontario Sauvignon Blanc. And in the pandemic, when we were all at home in that first bit, what I did is I said, what the hell? I’m going to open them both on the same night. But Mary said, oh, you can never finish that. I said, no, no, no, that’s not the idea. I’m going to pour half of them into half bottles and revisit them four or five nights hence. So I think when you open two different bottles of wine, you don’t learn twice as much. You learn three times as much because you’ve got them right there in front of you. But you can only do so much drinking before you get a little fuzzy.

Thomas Bachelder [00:02:11]:
So my idea is open both bottles, pour the first half of them off into little bottles, put those aside, and the second half of both drink them. Why the first half? Because that makes sure you preserve them and you get them fresh, right, with the cork out, and they’ll hold for another week, easy. That way, you don’t want to pour them into the half bottles the next morning when you wake up, you know, do it right Away, preserve it. And that’s a really good idea. You’ll learn faster than. Than having one wine the first night and then one wine three nights hence. How are you supposed to remember? Especially if you’re new to wine.

Andrea Morris [00:02:50]:
That’s true. And you can make little notes, and that’s okay.

Thomas Bachelder [00:02:53]:
So here we have Gama Noir. A lot of people just call it Gamay, but it is Gama Noir. And Gama Noir evolved in Beaujolais, which is below Burgundy in France. So if you know eastern France, Paris, then below it is Dijon, where the mustard comes from. And below that is Lyon. And Lyon is closer to the Mediterranean. Between Dijon and Lyon is Burgundy, Northern Burgundy, where Chardonnay and Pinot evolved. Pinot Noir and Gamay Noir really found its home in Beaujolais.

Thomas Bachelder [00:03:29]:
There was a thing called Beaujolais Nouveau, which was a fun, early, young drinking wine. But really what motivates the whole Beaujolais region is something called cru. They have 10 CRU towns. So their names, you know, like Moulin Avant and like Morgan and like Fleury and Cheruble, these are hard names to learn. But you just go into an lcbo or into a wine store and you say, I would like to taste a Cru Beaujolais. They will put a town in your hand with somebody’s name on it. You have to learn the town’s name and learn the producer. So that’s like saying, okay, where is the Chardonnay from? It’s from Vineland.

Thomas Bachelder [00:04:11]:
20 mile bench. Who made it? Ta’s okay. Taz made this wine from Vineland. So when you go to talk and buy a Beaujolais Cru, you’ll be drinking a Morgon made by Dovisa or some name. Just remember, take a picture. Everybody takes pictures of the wine bottles these days. And then they’re in your Google photos or whatever you use on the date you drank them. You know what I mean? Just take notes.

Thomas Bachelder [00:04:35]:
I drank this bottle then. So here we have. On the left, we have. Of course, all our bottles say Bachelor on the top, so we’re not going to mention that again. Then it says Niagara Cru. Single vineyard, Cru de Niagra. So in French. So then Kirby is.

Thomas Bachelder [00:04:53]:
Is the big lettering here. Gamay Noire 22. Kirby is the vineyard. The vineyard which is owned by Scott and Maria Kirby. So simple. They also have Kirby Estates, so check them out. Four Mile Creek. Why is it called Four Mile Creek?

Andrea Morris [00:05:10]:
Four miles away from Niagara Falls.

Thomas Bachelder [00:05:12]:
That’s right.

Andrea Morris [00:05:13]:
I feel like I’m on Jeopardy.

Thomas Bachelder [00:05:16]:
And Four Mile Creek snakes its way through the lower part of Niagara Lake. And some of the most interesting wines of Niagara Lake are made around the creek. Kirby is right on this old creek. Okay, the next wine we’re going to have, that’s your left handed glass. And in your right handed glass, there’s Wismer hyphen, Foxcroft. Wismer family’s from Vineland, so it’s Wismer Foxcroft, Gamay Noire 22 from 20 mile bench, 20 miles from. From Niagara Falls. Yeah.

Thomas Bachelder [00:05:47]:
And Wismer Foxtroft is so called because the Wismer family is a growing family. They do not have a winery, but they have about 300 acres or about 120 hectares of grapes in Vineland. So they own a lot of Vineland. So the possibilities are nearly endless. In all their different plots, they’re largely planted to Gamay Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, all three of which we do. They also do some great Riesling and Cabernet Franc, but I digress. So Wismer Foxcroft simply means Wismer owns it. And they bought the vineyard from Robert Foxcroft back in the day.

Thomas Bachelder [00:06:25]:
So we’re honoring both the old farming family and the current one by doing that. And we did that because there’s, as I said before, several Wismer vineyards. But most importantly, in your left glass, you have pure Niagara in the lake game, and in your right glass, pure bench from the Vineland bench. It’s not quite legal to say Vineland bench yet you have to say 20 mile bench. But it’s the Vineland or Western side. So if you smell both these, it’s pretty much sure that the juicier, lovelier, richer smell comes from the left one, Niagara Lake. And the more perfumed sort of mineral. Bloody.

Thomas Bachelder [00:07:08]:
I don’t want to say bloody, but ferret, you know, ferric smell. The smell of iron, flinty comes from the right glass. So if you get them mixed up, just remember, with Gamay Noir, at least, nagging lakes almost always juicier. And to the folks who listen to your regular podcast, if you don’t consider yourself, you know, an expert and just a beginner, it doesn’t matter. But one thing you can always learn is you can learn both by smelling without turning the glass, and you can smell by turning the glass. But when you swirl the glass, some people say that’s for snobs. If you think that’s for schnobs, then don’t do it. The experts say this when you don’t swirl is when you get the finest, most pure aromas, but they’re faint.

Thomas Bachelder [00:08:04]:
So when you swirl, you get more. But they’re not as fine. They’re a little pushed into your face. Right.

Andrea Morris [00:08:10]:
Because they’re aerated.

Thomas Bachelder [00:08:11]:
Because they’re aerated. And you’re disturbing the wine. But there’s.

Andrea Morris [00:08:16]:
You’re not spilling it.

Thomas Bachelder [00:08:19]:
There’s something more luscious about the left glass, which is Kirby from Niagara Lake, Four Mile Creek. And there’s something more stern and reserved about the bench wine. And as to color, in this particular case, what’s interesting, they’re pretty even in color. Maybe you should comment on that, not me.

Andrea Morris [00:08:41]:
Well, you are doing a fine job, and I talk a lot, so it’s nice to have a break.

Thomas Bachelder [00:08:46]:
Well, there’s.

Andrea Morris [00:08:47]:
But they are very equally colored.

Thomas Bachelder [00:08:49]:
Yeah, they’re colored maybe a little. Maybe a little darker from Niagara Lake, but they’re fairly.

Andrea Morris [00:08:53]:
You know what? When I take it out of that glaring light, I think that the Wismer is darker.

Thomas Bachelder [00:09:00]:
Yeah. So I guess the Wismer Foxcroft.

Andrea Morris [00:09:04]:
Rather.

Thomas Bachelder [00:09:04]:
Wismer Foxcroft. Yeah. And I think one of the things I wanted to talk about, Andrea, was this. Like, when people come to our tasting room, or to any tasting room, I think one of the other benefits of focusing on single vineyard wines of place. Wines of place is that you learn something. You learn that more than you just liked glass number two, you learn that you want to follow Wismer Foxcroft next time you see it, or Kirby, or simply that you want to follow the difference between Niagara and the Lake. Flatter and closer to lake and warmer and the bench farther away, cooler, warmer, makes wines that are more reserved. But the cool thing is here, us and a few other people do this, since we don’t own the vineyards and we run around trying to make deals to get these old vines here and there, we find out that the same winemaking process here has made two very different wines.

Thomas Bachelder [00:10:03]:
So since the winemaker is the same, it has to be the terroir that’s different. Now, nobody can do everything exactly the same in two batches. It’s like saying, I’m going to parent all my 20 children the same way. When you have your first child, you’re really locked in by the time you get to your 20th. I don’t know if that’s a thing anymore, but I’m sure you’re pretty. The older kids are bringing up the younger kids, you know.

Andrea Morris [00:10:28]:
Yeah.

Thomas Bachelder [00:10:29]:
So let’s take a look at this. So let’s go just with the Kirby, the Left glass.

Andrea Morris [00:10:33]:
Your first baby.

Thomas Bachelder [00:10:34]:
First baby. Now I’m spitting because I do this for a living. But one of the reasons to spit is it’s not to get drunk. Because after you finish spitting, you can then drink the wine you want. It’s so that you can taste with accuracy for longer. You can do more wines without getting fatigued. So the alcohol, even a little bit, even if you’re nowhere near tipsy, starts to make you feel, hey, I feel pretty good. And also that, you know, all these wines are good, you know, so spitting is good.

Thomas Bachelder [00:11:11]:
And I poured a little more than you need here, so at the end we can tip them out. But right now to have a little more lets us see the color and assess the nose and the mouthfeel and take a second sip if we want. So 22 was a year in which the crop was reduced in Niagara. And because of a winter event in February where some of the dormant buds died due to a minus 22. And I want to remind people that when your parents, or if you’re a gardener yourself, you remember people in marginal areas, like most of southern Canada, which means we’re warm. But some plants are marginal in the winter because they die back in the winter. They’ll wrap them with a canvas or burlap, these little bushes or whatever they’re growing, or they’ll move pots inside, right? So what they’re trying to protect in the winter is the dormant buds, that little bud that’s going to flower out the next year into leaves and flowers. If that bud fries or gets frozen right then you’re not going to have any shoot coming out of that place.

Thomas Bachelder [00:12:22]:
But other buds may be tucked in and may survive that minus 22. It’s very rare in Niagara and it’s usually for one hour in the middle of the night. On one night of the year, those buds that die will not produce a cane. So that cane usually has one to two bunches on it. That’s two bunches that that plant doesn’t have. The bad news is on that day in winter, we already knew we would have a short crop that year. The good news is if we had any kind of a summer, it would be great because the plant didn’t have much to do. It’s like if you imagine a pig or a dog that has a litter of 12 and only the space to feed 10, there’s going to be a couple of runts of the litter.

Thomas Bachelder [00:13:07]:
If that same dog only has four puppies, they’re going to be chubby, well fed puppies that’s this year it was a pretty cool year. 21 and this is 22, a pretty cool year, but with crop production by nature. So we have lovely, luscious fruit. Because the vine was like, especially in Niagara Lake where most freezes occurred, the vine was like, woohoo. This is an easy summer and it’s not too hot, not too cold. But I’ve got lots of energy here.

Andrea Morris [00:13:35]:
I’m going to always now think of 2022 as the chubby, well fed puppy wine year.

Thomas Bachelder [00:13:40]:
There’s a brand in that somewhere.

Andrea Morris [00:13:43]:
Chubby Pup wine. This, this has a really, it’s the nose is really fruity.

Thomas Bachelder [00:13:49]:
Yeah.

Andrea Morris [00:13:49]:
And I’m tasting a little cranberry.

Thomas Bachelder [00:13:51]:
I do too. And I tasting when you get into your mouth, there’s a little raspberry, a little cherry. Niagara’s famous for having cherry flavors, cherry pit flavors, especially in Pinot Noir. But what I love about this. And we’ll get to Pinot Noir later in the show. But Gamay has a higher acidity than Pinot Noir. And for those of you who love pairing foods. So if you like, if you like a charcuterie plate, let’s say, and you’re going to have or just cheese.

Thomas Bachelder [00:14:22]:
Pinot Noir is very good with cheese. We’ll talk about Chardonnay later and charcuterie. But some of the fattier things or the saltier thing can beat up a Pinot Noir. And beat up meaning, like you can’t taste the wine as much as you did before you started eating. Gamay laughs at that. With its acidity, it just cuts through everything. Now it’s not acidity like wincing acidity, it’s freshening acidity. As you can see, this pretty big fruit here.

Thomas Bachelder [00:14:49]:
But Gamay as a rule is like Pinot Noir. It just has a little more bracing acidity. So if you think of it as being, you know, it’s just Gamay always has its posture. I tend to slump a lot. Game always has its back straight with that backbone of acidity. Now if we switch to the bench here with this deep, deep red. Beautiful, beautiful. And that’s the other thing, folks at home, you know, like when you’re serving a red wine tasting to yourself, like my idea of opening two bottles at once, preserving the first half and then seeing one on both of them on night one and again four nights later on the weekend, see the next two.

Thomas Bachelder [00:15:28]:
One of the things you got to do is have the same glasses and pour the same amount in each glass because the color’s affected by the volume in the glass. The deeper the glass, you know, the more, you know your bathtub. The water looks white. If the bathtub would look be big enough, it would look blue. Right. Because that’s the way oceans are and lakes are. So, I mean, red wines look deeper with more in the glass. So you have to have the same amount in each glass.

Thomas Bachelder [00:15:57]:
So here we go. We’re going to the bench.

Andrea Morris [00:15:59]:
Going to the bench.

Thomas Bachelder [00:16:00]:
I remind you from the last episode, we said something like, what’s the bench? Well, Niagara Falls Falls from the escarpment. But on the escarpment west of Niagara Falls, there are different terraces on the bench, Wide, flat bits that we call a bench. Like a bench, except there’s multiple bench. Some people call them the first bench, the double bench, the third bench. Basically, when you get over the brow, the eyebrow, or the tip of the head of the escarpment and up onto the high plateau that goes right to Lake Erie, there’s no more benches. So it’s basically with your back to Lake Ontario, it’s a slow rise till you get to the bench. The first bench is about 120 meters up from sea level, and then there’s another level and sometimes another level. This varies enormously.

Thomas Bachelder [00:16:51]:
Once you walk over the top of the escarpment, you can walk the rest of the 30 clicks right to Lake Erie.

Andrea Morris [00:16:57]:
Wow.

Thomas Bachelder [00:16:57]:
That’s how it’s formed around here. And it’s very consistent how far the escarpment is from the lake is what varies and the altitude varies and whether there’s a bench or not and how many benches. And that’s why I’m telling you this should be named a UNESCO site, and we should put a few less houses on our benches and a few more vineyards, you know, because this is really. It’s not just a national heritage, pride of heritage, and a jewel in our crown, it’s a world heritage. Because Pinot Noir is hard to grow and you need great limestone. If you want to be like Burgundy, you don’t have to. Oregon doesn’t have it. They have beautiful sandstone and beautiful volcanic rocks, and they make amazing Pinot Noir.

Andrea Morris [00:17:42]:
I think it’s important what you say about preserving the space and not overpopulating it with housing, because it is precious and it is a very special area. And the way you’re talking about the terroir, it’s important to actually understand that and know that you can’t just plant a vineyard anywhere.

Thomas Bachelder [00:18:03]:
No, you can’t. And like, we’re in southern Ontario. Like, anywhere in Niagara could ripen vines. That’s not the problem. The problem is we get those cold events every three winters. We get down below minus 20 and vines don’t like it then. Only the vineyards that are within view of the lake are usually spared at those times. If you were up halfway to Lake Erie, it’s blisteringly cold up there.

Thomas Bachelder [00:18:29]:
There’s no lake to warm you up. And, you know, you may be thinking, well, how is a lake gonna warm me up in the winter? Well, the answer is Lake Ontario is one of the few. It’s so deep it doesn’t freeze. So that is warmer air coming off that lake than it should be. At minus 22, the lake is at zero. It’s not frozen or, you know, zero or above. And so it’s a very interesting part of the world. So this escarpment, it’s 400, 500 kilometers long, but just the 80 kilometers or so of it that face the Lake Ontario at this deep end of the lake is a very precious part of the world.

Thomas Bachelder [00:19:12]:
And it also happens the ancient shore here called the Escarpment, also happens to be made of limestone, which is not the only thing you can make Pinot on, but it’s what Burgundy, Pinot Noir evolved on. So it’s a pretty special place. And given the Canadian dollar, our wines look cheaper than a lot of other people’s. So we have a real. Like, the time is now to preserve the escarpment and preserve these great vineyard lands. Now, I should mention the Escarpment Commission exists, and it does preserve the Escarpment from, you know, rampant building. I mean, cities have their urban growth boundary, and so that still goes on, but basically the escarpment is protected. But one of the things we want to do with this, the Bachelder project of, we call it Mapping Niagara, One vineyard at a time, is to show people that many, if not all parts of Niagara have great worth as a place to grow grapes on this precious escarpment.

Thomas Bachelder [00:20:19]:
So grapes that have a sense of place worthy, worthy grapes and noble wines issued from those little parcels. So if we can show with a smile instead of legislation, that, oh, my God, you need to be drinking wine from this place, well, then investors and business people and viticulturalists, sometimes all the same person can say, by God, I’m sinking my money here. I do not care if I could get more for this vineyard as a housing site. I am going to keep it in vines. That’s what Leaning Post has done. You got to interview Leaning Post out there.

Andrea Morris [00:20:58]:
They will be in February.

Thomas Bachelder [00:20:59]:
Yes, they’re a Fabulous family. And they are just protecting their patch from urbanization. And it’s not like, oh, you’re a hero. You’re not letting people plant houses. No, you’re a hero because you’re showing people what great land that is out there. And we’re going to taste a wine from out there in the Chardonnay. So it’s going to be very exciting. So here, let’s get back to the Gamay’s here.

Andrea Morris [00:21:21]:
Before we do this, I just want to say that I think that you should print up T shirts that say, worthy wines and noble grapes.

Thomas Bachelder [00:21:27]:
I’ve never said those words before.

Andrea Morris [00:21:29]:
He did today. But I think that that would be a great T shirt. And that would get people like. People like. What are you talking about? Worthy wines and noble grapes. Let’s start it.

Thomas Bachelder [00:21:39]:
Mm.

Andrea Morris [00:21:41]:
Do it.

Thomas Bachelder [00:21:42]:
Beautiful idea. And sometimes you don’t even know what you’re saying. Out of the mouth of babes.

Andrea Morris [00:21:46]:
Sometimes people have to listen.

Thomas Bachelder [00:21:47]:
Yeah, exactly.

Andrea Morris [00:21:49]:
But now we’re going to try this. Beautiful. And I have to say, listener, I’ve already, like, sneak snipped this, so I know how great this Whismer Foxcroft Gamma Noir is.

Thomas Bachelder [00:22:01]:
And that’s the next step is it’s like being inclusive of all people. People who get hooked in by the bench. They love the bench. And you can see this is like the. The Niagara in the Lake Kirby vineyard we had was beautiful. It’s older vines, has a lovely juiciness and a firmness on the finish. But the Wismer Foxcroft here is scented. It smells slightly ferric, like slightly irony, slightly flinty, but its fruit is somehow a little more serious.

Thomas Bachelder [00:22:33]:
It begs you to. It asks you to come in and try to figure it out. It’s like somebody’s not going to give it all up on the first date. You better wait for me, baby. You know? And that’s the bench in general.

Andrea Morris [00:22:45]:
It’s like, second sip. It’s like, I’m not going to tell you on my first sip what I’m all about.

Thomas Bachelder [00:22:49]:
That’s right. And that is why, by the way, that is why people age wines. If you sense with however little you know, however much you know, however little you listen to podcasts, however little you read about wine, however much you do, it’s the same for every person. You sit down in front of a bottle, you open the bottle and you say, hello, lover. Hello. You’re luscious. Oh, but wait a sec. I sense you’re not giving me everything right now.

Thomas Bachelder [00:23:19]:
I’m going to buy two bottles of this and put it down for a couple of months and see if it changes. And those wines that don’t give it up all right away usually have some aging potential. And you may find that, you know, salutary. You may find it’s great that they age well. And you may say, you know, I don’t give a crap. I’m going to have this other one that is beautiful and fruity right away. I have room in my head in my life for both those kinds of wines. Most wines improve a little, especially if they’re super young when you buy them.

Thomas Bachelder [00:23:50]:
Right. But definitely I wanted to hammer down here as we leave Niagara Lake and go to the bench, because we’re mostly a bench producer, but we do love Niagara Lake and have great respect for its heritage, its old vines, and the taste of the wines. But you can become something that we call a bench snob. So I would encourage, even if we and your podcast make you fall a little bit in love with the bench, there’s still no reason to diss Niagara Lake. No, I mean, it’s a great area.

Andrea Morris [00:24:23]:
We will eventually get down there once we have finished, like, exploring all of the wineries here. But this wine in particular, I find that it’s, It’s. It’s richer.

Thomas Bachelder [00:24:35]:
I think it’s richer and it’s stonier. It has a longer finish, but they’re both, like, equal, but different. Like people from different parts of this country or different parts of the world of different races of different crees. You know, like, you can’t, you can’t. You know, it’s apples and oranges, but it’s amazing how the same grape made in the same way, wild yeast ferment and then just aging. Now, Gamay, despite what we said in the first podcast of, it’s nice to have a little new oak to rejuvenate the fleet. Gamay is all old oak always, plus some puncheons that are 500 liters. So the wine ages more slowly in that.

Thomas Bachelder [00:25:20]:
But it also keeps that crunchy Gamay fruit that you’re seeing right here. People rarely call Pinot Noir crunchy, as we’ll see later in the podcast. What it is is elegant and perfumed. It can be stony, but the crunchiness of the fruit, meaning this coconut, it’s like you can bite into an apple that crunch, or you can bite into a fresh berry and you can tell when it’s a little too ripe, if it’s not crunchy, the fruit. Right. So, yeah, this is a very long finish. And Gamay can be just as elegant as Pinot Noir. It’s just the higher acidity tends to make people put it towards the front of the meal or stay with it all meal long.

Thomas Bachelder [00:26:07]:
But if you were going to have Pinot Noir in the meal, it would probably be the second wine and have it with your main dish and the extra complexity and perfume. We’ll get there.

Andrea Morris [00:26:16]:
So this would be your appetizer Wine.

Thomas Bachelder [00:26:17]:
Appetizer wine or all day wine? Yeah, just, you know, like, I wouldn’t probably have it after a few.

Andrea Morris [00:26:23]:
It’s a blizzard and I’m just gonna drink.

Thomas Bachelder [00:26:25]:
There you go.

Andrea Morris [00:26:26]:
I’m gonna start off in Niagara and then move to the Bench and go God knows where afterwards.

Thomas Bachelder [00:26:32]:
But yeah, yeah, I love, I love your plan that since you’re from the Bench, this podcast is going to put down its tent poles on the bench and figure out the bench. And I think that’s that kind of focus is something that Niagara really needs. Now. I was talking more about to people out there. We’re bench lovers. You’re going to hear the Bench a lot from now on in the podcast, but don’t let it stop you from exploring Niagara Lake. I’m saying that more to the folks out there than you guys. I know you’re itching to get down there, but there’s a lot to do on the Bench.

Andrea Morris [00:27:06]:
Oh, for sure. And you know, we haven’t even. We’ve only done like maybe 15 episodes and we haven’t tapped the surface.

Thomas Bachelder [00:27:14]:
I know. I feel like I’ve been here 20 years and I haven’t even. I came here for three years and never left. So that’s how we had three year commitment to start to close Yarden. Speaking of which, there’s no need. Need to diss the Falls or tour buses or wineries that try to be everything to everybody. All these wineries have their place in our universe. But I remember when I moved here, I saw that we needed a paradigm shift.

Thomas Bachelder [00:27:39]:
I said, what if instead of people coming to Niagara Falls and having a great weekend and then grabbing wine from one winery and then leaving home or doing a quick tour, wouldn’t it be nice if we could flip that paradigm and have people come to, let’s say, the Bench, visit four or five wineries over the course of two days, go to a couple of restaurants, and as they left back home to Chicago or Buffalo or Montreal or Ottawa, say, oh my God, we forgot to go to the Falls. Oh, my God. And it’s actually happening. Like, people are coming just for the wine and Food, tourism, and remark. I am saying, may the Falls long be full of people, stay full of people. But there’s other people who are going to come here just to go to the Bench for their wines or just to Lincoln Lakeshore, which is us below us here in Beamsville, or just a Niagara lake. And. And just do wine and foodie experiences.

Thomas Bachelder [00:28:45]:
That is more and more. But it’s not eating Niagara Falls as lunch. There’s just more people coming. You’ve seen the highways in the summer. Yep. And it’s a good thing. It’s not take a bigger piece of someone’s pie. The Bench is just creating a bigger pie.

Thomas Bachelder [00:29:01]:
And I love that. I do, too. When you can be inclusive, you know?

Andrea Morris [00:29:03]:
Yeah.

Thomas Bachelder [00:29:04]:
And with that, I would like a little bathroom break and head over to Chardonnay land.

Andrea Morris [00:29:11]:
Yay. We’re back, and we’re ready to talk about Chardonnay. And I have three beautifully different Chardonnays sitting in front of me right now.

Thomas Bachelder [00:29:21]:
Yeah. I mean, we are gonna start on the bench in Vineland.

Andrea Morris [00:29:24]:
Yeah.

Thomas Bachelder [00:29:25]:
And. And what I want to do here is we make 11 different single vineyard, you know, Chardonnays. And that’s not a hero thing. It’s not like, oh, we make more single vineyards than you do. It’s like we’re explorers. It’s a great grape for Niagara. It loves limestone, and it loves long, cool summers. And we pick this in the middle of September into October.

Thomas Bachelder [00:29:48]:
That’s how cool Niagara is. Now, of course, we have some hot days in summer, but you know that lake that keeps us warm in winter? Warm. Ish.

Andrea Morris [00:29:57]:
Keeps us cool in summer.

Thomas Bachelder [00:29:58]:
It does. Like, we would have 35 degrees here. It never goes over 30 in Niagara. Not that I can remember. Mario, where I come from in Quebec, here’s some scorchers, some 33s there, because it’s much more landlocked. Okay. So I just want to say we’ve got three glasses of Chardonnay and three different colors. And three different colors.

Andrea Morris [00:30:17]:
You can’t see that. But I did take a photo which.

Thomas Bachelder [00:30:19]:
Will be posted, and we’re going to talk about those colors. And the three different things are Wismer Foxcroft, which was the last wine we had in Gamay. Well, we also have that plot in Chardonnay, so we thought that might be interesting to show. And then just 1,000 meters, otherwise known as a kilometer further from the lake, comes Wismer Wingfield, and particularly the block within Wismer Wingfield called Hilla Wingfield. That’s glass number two. The middle Class. And the last one is Frontier Block. Why? Because it’s the last vineyard in all of Niagara.

Thomas Bachelder [00:30:57]:
It’s the frontier, or in French, la frontier. So we forget in English that frontier meant border also. Not just the latest frontier like in Star Trek or the west, the Canadian west or the American West. So I want to draw your mind to the idea of the expensive wines, like the expense of wines. Not the expensive wines. The. The expensive wines. If you’re making a wine that is on the market eight months, nine months after it was picked, you don’t have a lot of costs in keeping that wine.

Thomas Bachelder [00:31:35]:
You know, the rent, the storage, the barrels. If you have a wine that doesn’t have to be sorted, the wine’s cheaper. If the wine does, the grapes don’t have to be sorted on a sorting table using real people and real hours. If it doesn’t need 20 months of barrel age, you know, the barrels cost money, even the old barrels, maintaining them. So then there’s the money of money. If you’re releasing chardonnays as we are here at 24 months, somebody had to sit on that money for two vintages. This is 22, right? We’re now in season 25. Like, we’re bottling our 23s.

Thomas Bachelder [00:32:13]:
The 24s are our new babies in barrel. And the 25 we’re starting to think about, we have to start pruning the vines for 25 vintage. This is 22. It’s ancient history for us, but it’s our most recent release, and that is to make the place show better. So everybody in Ontario starts off in the same place, which is the grapes they buy. Even if they own the grapes, the worth of those grapes is established by the grape growers of Ontario, GGO grape growers of Ontario, in negotiation with the trade with the wineries. Okay? So whether it’s $1,800ametric ton or it’s $3,000ametric ton, that will apply to how hard something is to grow or how much yield. Baco Noir gets a much higher yield.

Thomas Bachelder [00:33:03]:
Vidal gets a much higher yield. Those are hybrids. The vinifera grapes like Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir and Chardonnay get less yield, naturally. But some places, like Pinot Noir gets way less yield, and so the prices go up. So the GGO publishes a list of what you will pay per ton and what you. If. Even if you own them, what your accountants can value that at, right? And so. But that’s only the start of it.

Thomas Bachelder [00:33:34]:
If you have old vines, if you have a cool terroir that everybody wants. If you have a site that makes people dream, if you have a wine that is proven in international press that everybody loves it, now, you are going to pay more to that farmer. And the minute you pay more to that farmer, double GGO, we call that. What am I, 1.5. Actually, we need 1.75 GGO. Will you do the picking? No, no, no. Thomas, you and Mary still have to pick. We have to pay for the picking.

Thomas Bachelder [00:34:06]:
Okay. They are old vines. You know, it’s that kind of discussion with a smile on your face. But by the time we get the grapes, we’re like, this has got to work. And this is going to be a $49 plus wine with all those factors. So can Niagara produce great 18 to $22 wine? Yes, it can. No doubt. But if you want wines.

Thomas Bachelder [00:34:30]:
A place that her husband did and kept apart and scrupulously sorted and aged for two years and paid double to get the old vines or the sexy parcel that everybody wants. That’s just the way of the world, man. Burgundy’s the same way. Oregon and California the same way. I believe California Chardonnay from Single vineyards start these days from good plots at around 75 U.S. wow. Niagara, single vineyard Chardonnay starts at around $35 Canadian. So, I mean, we have.

Thomas Bachelder [00:35:02]:
We have Chardonnays that are somewhere between 40 and 75. Obviously, the ones that are at 75, we make very little of. There’s not much of the old vines. We’re lucky to get some, and we don’t make much, so it sells. So here you have Whismur Foxcroft. We had this in white, and. And even without turning it, you can see I’m going to be suggestive here. They’re all barrel fermented, so they’ll all maybe smell a bit like vanilla or something.

Thomas Bachelder [00:35:30]:
But the overriding nose on Wismer Foxcroft is this kind of seashell oyster shell liqueur. Like a sea spray, a flintiness. And as it goes over the gums, as you drink it, almost a salinity, a stoniness. Now, it’s a massive wine. There’s richness, there’s all kinds of fruit flavors. But I’m describing the minerality because the minerality is what gives you your sense of place that, you know you’re drinking Foxcroft. Okay. And with that, I’m going to bring up the subject of blind tasting.

Thomas Bachelder [00:36:03]:
Like, blind tasting. That’s Wismer Fox Groff we just described in Chardonnay a bunch of people Make Wismer Fox Groff Cloudsley 2027 sellers on and on. But the point is, you don’t have to be able to find that blind to. For the taste to exist. The tastes exist. If you have three kids and you go into the nursery in their bedroom, they’re all young, late at night, the lights off, and you can’t tell which one is which, they’re still your kids when you can see them again in the daytime. So this is still Wismer Fox Riff, even if I can’t get it blind. Right.

Thomas Bachelder [00:36:37]:
Because we’re going to do wine that’s 1000 meters away next. So let’s go. Let’s make sure we know this wine.

Andrea Morris [00:36:43]:
It’s just got a nice. The aroma to it. The nose is just. I smell a little bit of like. I don’t want. I wouldn’t say vanilla. I say more caramel, I think for me. And which is what I got when I tasted this at Cloudsley as well.

Andrea Morris [00:37:00]:
I find it’s got this whole complexity to it. It’s very rich for a very rich.

Thomas Bachelder [00:37:04]:
And we’re going to come back to this because we have three wines. We’re going to taste all three and come back. But aside from all the richness, the little bit of.

Andrea Morris [00:37:15]:
It’s warm.

Thomas Bachelder [00:37:16]:
It’s warm.

Andrea Morris [00:37:16]:
Yeah.

Thomas Bachelder [00:37:17]:
It’s closer to lake. This is 130 meters of height and it’s 3.4.4 kilometers from the lake. I should have said. And now let’s move to Wismer Wingfield, which, because it’s a thousand meters kilometer further from Lake Ontario. The summer is over. It’s time to pick grapes. We pick Wismar Foxcroft. Well, this one, Wismer Wingfield struggles for another three weeks to come.

Thomas Bachelder [00:37:43]:
In 10 days to three weeks, because the summer’s over, we’re heading towards October. We’re farther, a kilometer further from the lake. The lake can’t help out with its. You know how the lake stores all that heat and it’s warm in September. Right. If you go to the ocean, to the Atlantic coast, you. You want to swim in August, not in early June. That’s when the water’s the warmest.

Thomas Bachelder [00:38:03]:
July is the warmest days, but the water may not be warmed up yet. So that’s the Atlantic coast. We have the coast of Lake Ontario. It really warms up towards the end of summer, especially the. The shoreline waters. And they feed this area with warmth into September when the sun is not as warm. So here, this one is harvested three weeks later to get to the same level, not to get overripe as Foxcroft. This hillowing field is a very small patch right on the hill.

Thomas Bachelder [00:38:35]:
And it has some of the same aroma, some of the same oyster shell.

Andrea Morris [00:38:39]:
And it smells more appley to me.

Thomas Bachelder [00:38:40]:
Yeah, more appley, I think, because it struggles to get ripe. It has a little less ripeness three weeks later. But in the mouth it’s simply grandiose.

Andrea Morris [00:38:51]:
It is, yes. It’s. It’s like at first sip it tasted crispy, kind of app like apple. It tasted like I was eating, like. Like I just bit into an apple. And now it’s like on the second sip, it’s softer and it’s like maybe more like. Like it’s a pie.

Thomas Bachelder [00:39:10]:
Love it.

Andrea Morris [00:39:10]:
You know, like it like, it’s like. Because again, with wine tasting listener, you always have to do at least three sips. You do, because your first sip is like, the wine’s just kind of like, hi. And then the second sip is like you kind of get to know each other. And by the third sip, you’re best friends.

Thomas Bachelder [00:39:27]:
So cool. And Vineland is really quite far from Lake all of Vineland, the ancient coast that is the escarpment and the coast itself of Lake Ontario kind of separate a bit more at Vineland. So when you’re driving in from Toronto, let’s say Beamsville, seems you can see the escarpment right from the highway. But by the time you get to Vineland, it’s like, whoa, there’s the escarpment way over there to the south.

Andrea Morris [00:39:55]:
You know, this is a beautiful wine. It’s so interesting how different it is from the Wismer Foxcroft, which is also a beautiful wine. But this one to me is just. It’s different than any Chardonnay I’ve had in this area.

Thomas Bachelder [00:40:10]:
So now let’s go back before we go out to the frontier Bock with that presence of Wismer Wingfield Hill, of Wingfield Foxcroft. What’s going to happen almost for sure is it’s harder to smell the caramel because both wines have a bit of that element. They’re barrel fermented. They’re in barrel, hardly any new for 20 months. It’s going to mark them in some way. Plus there’s always a caramelly taste from Chardonnay because it has some lactic acid in it from malolactic fermentation. And lactic acid is the acid of milk. So you’re always going to get some milk product in a long age, Chardonnay, because it’s naturally there in the grape, the lactic acid.

Thomas Bachelder [00:40:50]:
So that’s as technical as we’re getting, folks. But it’s good to know. It’s good to know. That’s why Chardonnay can be buttery, even if it hasn’t seen any time in an oak barrel.

Andrea Morris [00:41:01]:
But you know what’s interesting? After tasting the.

Thomas Bachelder [00:41:03]:
The hill of Wingfield, the hill of.

Andrea Morris [00:41:05]:
Winfield, and then going back to the Whismer Foxcroft, now to me, this tastes like a caramel apple.

Thomas Bachelder [00:41:12]:
The Foxcroft.

Andrea Morris [00:41:13]:
The Foxcroft, yeah, it tastes. It’s. I’ve got more of that. Like that. More of the. Of a. Like a. Like a.

Andrea Morris [00:41:20]:
An appley. Not. Not so much as much appley, but more of like the caramel kind of like.

Thomas Bachelder [00:41:24]:
So cool.

Andrea Morris [00:41:25]:
I love this.

Thomas Bachelder [00:41:26]:
We. So we focus because we. You’re right, we focus so intensely on what we perceive the stone tastes like because we’re trying to see how they’re different from where they’re grown. And by stone, I mean this. If you have water that comes from a glacier that’s melting, and that’s the case of Evian in France, up near Lac Lemon there, up near Geneva in Switzerland, yeah, that’s one kind of water. But then a mineral water that’s come up through tons of rock, bubbling through rock underground, actually tastes like stone. And so for people who. If you ever want to learn about minerality and wine, start by tasting all kinds of different waters.

Thomas Bachelder [00:42:11]:
Ones that call themselves just spring water still may have some mineral content. You can read it on the side, then taste ones that are. Say, I’m a mineral water. And some of them are like, whoa, that’s salty. I can’t drink that, you know, or I like this. So there’s all kinds of different stoniness and saltiness. And this sounds super geeky, but basically, if you never pay attention to that, it’s still what separates the flavor of one wine from another. At the high end, at the $18 wine, you’re not going to get that.

Thomas Bachelder [00:42:43]:
You can get a lot of pleasure, a lot of great fruit flavors, same amount of alcohol and acidity, but really, you have to get a single vineyard to start talking this way. And it’s one of those things that ignites in your brain when you do a lot of wine tasting or doesn’t like. I want to follow this. I am going to start buying. Not Chardonnay anymore, but I’m going to buy a Chardonnay from Niagara that comes from here or there. Speaking of here or there, when you’re coming, let’s take it from the States this time, remember Niagara goes east to west. The States is to the east of us and Hamilton is to the west of us and Toronto, surprisingly for Torontonians is to the north of us. Torontonians and Montrealers like me, you grow up with the lake to the south of you.

Thomas Bachelder [00:43:33]:
In my case, the River Le Saint Laurent, which comes from Lake Ontario to the south of you. So it bends your mind to come around that corner past Mississauga, Oakville and, and Burlington and you do a complete 180. And you’re sitting here and you say, well, I just want to head south to Lake. I say to them, if you’re going to head south to Lake, you got 30 clicks to Lake Erie and then you’ll be south to Lake. It’s so hard to understand until you’ve done it a few times. Like you’ll be turning onto a road in Niagara and they’ll say X road south and you’re heading towards Lake Erie. When you want to head towards Lake Ontario, you get it. It’s not that hard, but it is fun.

Thomas Bachelder [00:44:10]:
It does bend your mind backwards. So here we are going directly west towards Hamilton to the last vineyard in Niagara. It’s not the last vineyard on the peninsula. It’s the last vineyard in what we know as Niagara. After that it’s the township of Hamilton. And yes, the Hammer is not all a city. There’s lots of farmland around Hamilton and some of it has vineyards. Okay.

Thomas Bachelder [00:44:36]:
And there’s some great stuff to be done there. This is the last vineyard within the Niagara Appalachian and it’s called Lincoln Lake Shore. The Appalachian there. We’ve left the 20 mile bench around the 20 mile creek and now we’ve gone out to 50 mile creek and the Grimsby hillside most western block is called the Frontier block. It’s on. It’s a very stony site. It’s extremely close to the lake. So if you’re coming from the States and you don’t give a hoot for wine, all you want to do is drive to Toronto.

Thomas Bachelder [00:45:12]:
So you come across at the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls, let’s say, and you drive that qew all the way past Saint Catharines, past Jordan and Vineland and Beamsville, and as you know, going up, coming up towards stoney creek, that’s 50 mile creek. You’ll suddenly see if you’re on the Queen, you’ll suddenly see the escarpment is right beside the highway and you’re like, whoa, they’re closing down on me. Are they going to force me into the Water here, but no, that’s as close as the escarpment gets to lake, and that’s where we are right there. And there’s a fabulous winery there called Leaning Post, run by Ilya and run by Nadja Senchuk. And they’re wonderful. And I’m sure you’re going to be going there soon.

Andrea Morris [00:45:53]:
We will be. Listener. Never have no fear.

Thomas Bachelder [00:45:57]:
So they’re wonderful, and they’re doing that terroir of what we hope someday will be called the Grimsby Narrows, because the escarpment narrows it down to the lake there. And these are wines. It’s a cooler area. And these are wines of great fragrance. Again, we have the stony oyster shell, seashell, crushed seashell, or sea spray. You know, when you’re at the sea and you smell the spray, See, it’s not just salt, it’s life. It’s plankton, it’s seaweed. It’s all those things and many more.

Thomas Bachelder [00:46:28]:
Right. And all those things are on the nose of all these three bench wines. That limestone marks these wines in that way, however, all in a different way. And so these are three bench wines.

Andrea Morris [00:46:42]:
They’re so distinctly different. This one, to me, has a little bit of pear on it, I think.

Thomas Bachelder [00:46:47]:
So. That’s beautiful. You’re a great taster.

Andrea Morris [00:46:49]:
Thank you.

Thomas Bachelder [00:46:50]:
It’s also nice to hear somebody come to these wines fresh and. And hear just precious. Hey, Mary. Mary’s walked into the podcast. That was Mary Delaney, my partner of something like 36 years. And we met. She was running her dad’s little art gallery in Montreal and ballerina, and we went to wine school, and her dad closed the gallery. We said, why’d you do that? Mary was like, turning the gallery around.

Thomas Bachelder [00:47:21]:
He goes, I knew you weren’t coming back. I said, no, we’re gonna make wine in Quebec. But as it turned out, as I said earlier in the first podcast, we ended up moving to Oregon very shortly after and being wine gypsies for a while before we set it in Niagara. Even in Niagara, though, while we’ve been here, we’ve done projects in Burgundy and Oregon and Chile. So, you know, once you’re a bit of a nomad, it’s just the way it is, eh? Travel.

Andrea Morris [00:47:46]:
It’s fun, though. You can see the world.

Thomas Bachelder [00:47:47]:
You can see the world. And, yeah, there’s great fun in knowledge. And that brings me back to the raison d’ etre of this podcast, as I understand it. And I’ve listened to a couple, I think, and you’ve told me much more is I think if we can agree that you don’t have to know anything about wine to appreciate it. But every little bit that you know and you learn by chance, even if you’re not applying yourself, illuminates something else.

Andrea Morris [00:48:16]:
Yeah.

Thomas Bachelder [00:48:17]:
At a certain point, you realize, oh, my God, you can never get to the end of all this. And that’s how geeks are born. And nobody listening has to become a super geek. But the possibility is there that you’ll go down a pleasurable rabbit hole in some way. It could be on a grape type, it could be on a region, it could be on single vineyards. It could be on one producer. It could be on, like, I have so many friends who are not in the business, but who. They cannot travel without making it a.

Thomas Bachelder [00:48:47]:
Partly a wine vacation. And even if you go to a place. Mary and I went to India years ago when the girls were young, over Christmas for a bit of a break and. And some sun and some culture. We found the wines that were there. We tasted Indian wines. We didn’t go to any wine regions. We tasted foreign wines in India.

Thomas Bachelder [00:49:07]:
And that was a trip. And so the point is, it was not a wine trip at all. It was more of a temple trip. But wine still sneaks its way in. Once you love it and it loves you back, it’s hard to escape.

Andrea Morris [00:49:19]:
It lures you in.

Thomas Bachelder [00:49:20]:
It does lure you in.

Andrea Morris [00:49:21]:
Yeah. But it’s also, you know, when we talk, you talked about the price of wine, and I think when you understand what goes into the making of it and you’ve gone to wineries and, like, speaking to people like you, you understand the passion, you understand the process, and you go, yeah, I get that. It’s like people talk about, you know, like, it’s the difference in, like, even clothing and designer clothing. This is like, it’s not to say this is designer wine, but it’s to say that you can drink this and you can taste this and say, I deserve this.

Thomas Bachelder [00:49:55]:
Exactly.

Andrea Morris [00:49:56]:
You know what? I work hard, and you know what? I deserve to have a glass of wine that’s at that price point. Because that enriches how I feel about myself at the moment.

Thomas Bachelder [00:50:09]:
That’s so well said. And that’s something I learned at the Cool Climate Chardonnay celebration, because not to get gender, but in the past, wine and collecting wine was largely a man thing. And one of the great moments in my life and, you know, and the women have. Are so present in the wine industry now, especially in Niagara. And one of the things about Niagara being a new region of any gender when you come down here, it’s totally unthreatening. There’s not books written on it everywhere. Like libraries and wine stores are not full of books on Niagara. So just come here and experience it off the cuff.

Thomas Bachelder [00:50:44]:
Take away what you take away, but a little ad for a nonprofit organization which is called the Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration. The international Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration. It’s every third weekend in July for three days. Wineries come from all over the world. Niagara’s a home team, and wineries come from everywhere to be part of this 60 wineries. So it’s called coolchardonnay.org because it’s not for profit. That is the earl. And go on it and check it out and see who’s coming this year.

Thomas Bachelder [00:51:18]:
It’ll be posted soon. And when you come down here, it’s 13 years old now. And this is what I was selling to you. I saw so many women or bunches of women gal friends coming down and giving themselves the permission to start Chardonnay sellers, their own Chardonnay cellar. Their husband could be a big cabernet drinker or their significant other could hate wine, but they. You could see the lights. I’m talking 13 years old, but especially. I don’t notice that anymore.

Thomas Bachelder [00:51:50]:
But the first few years, you would see people saying exactly what you said. I think I’m going to start to follow Chardonnay. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with Pinot Grigio and Sauvignon Blanc. Chardonnay really expresses its place. Well, you have to pay a little money for it, but goddamn it, I’m worth it, you know? And you see people making those decisions. Oh, right. I don’t have to become a collector and save wine for 20 years. I can just start with Chardonnay, get four or five terroirs I like, and just follow them and learn more.

Thomas Bachelder [00:52:24]:
And to that point, here we are way, right here, way out here. West in Grimsby, hillside on their frontier block. If you want to pop back, if you would, to the Foxcroft, you’ll see such a contrast now, where it’s about, you know, 30 kilometers. And we can do it in three glasses here. There’s a great stony.

Andrea Morris [00:52:44]:
Yeah, you really taste the minerality more. After tasting the frontier block and then going to the Foxcroft, the minerality of this comes out more. It’s really. This is really fun to have all three and go back and forth and see how tasting one affects the taste of the other.

Thomas Bachelder [00:53:05]:
And so true. Yeah. So when you tasted your first one, you were tasting And I was. We all were tasting your first barrel fermented wine from the Niagara bench. By the time you got to number three, that was a constant. So what was the variable? Well, now where it’s from, you know, and going back and forth, you start to see it. And you know, we’re doing this with three wines. Imagine with 11 different Chardonnays from the same producer.

Andrea Morris [00:53:30]:
Mind blown.

Thomas Bachelder [00:53:31]:
It exists. It exists. And you saw all the differences. Y. Yeah, Lucas saw the differences.

Andrea Morris [00:53:36]:
Yes. Because you can see, listener, you’ll see this when you look at things. At the photos I’ll be posting. You can see the difference in the color. The nose is slightly different and the taste, which. The things that each one of us is tasting are completely different than what you might be tasting. But they’re very distinct in what they are.

Thomas Bachelder [00:53:58]:
Yeah. I sometimes get people from away, afar, far farther away than Toronto or Ottawa or Buffalo. And I’d love to say, look, first of all, I am not a researcher and I’m not a teacher, but it sounds like that sometimes I’m a producer of wine. So I’m just trying to do this. Mary and I are trying to do this mapping Niagara thing. But I said, really, where you’re going to learn is not from what I say, it’s from what your palate tells you. But if I could go to the punchline and say, talking to this mythical person, and there was one here like that this week, journalist from away, I say, look, if I could leave you with one impression, one only, it would be that you leave believing that the terroirs of Niagara are vastly different. If you just take that away, I don’t care what you think about us as a producer.

Thomas Bachelder [00:54:49]:
Take that message to the world that you believe in the variance between the Niagara terroirs and. And you’ll have done a great service to humanity. Right?

Andrea Morris [00:54:59]:
Yeah.

Thomas Bachelder [00:55:00]:
I mean, this is a very small sphere of influence. Burgundian grapes done in Niagara. It’s not going to change the world. But, you know, like great art. Great art. Like, it’s hard to do art in wartime, but when times are peaceful, like art elevates humanity. Great wine from single plots elevates humanity. It’s a quest to.

Thomas Bachelder [00:55:22]:
For something beyond having alcohol in your system.

Andrea Morris [00:55:25]:
But see, that’s another T shirt. Great wines elevate humanity. I swear to God, We.

Thomas Bachelder [00:55:30]:
I know I’m going to be well dressed this summer.

Andrea Morris [00:55:32]:
We. Damn the bot shoulder.

Thomas Bachelder [00:55:34]:
Such a good idea.

Andrea Morris [00:55:37]:
Great wines elevate humanity. I can’t wait to elevate our humanity with The Pinot Noirs.

Thomas Bachelder [00:55:41]:
Here we go.

Andrea Morris [00:55:43]:
Make humanity. Make. Yeah. Pinot Noir. Make humanity great again, we find.

Thomas Bachelder [00:55:48]:
So actually, yeah, let’s take a break while I clink some glasses and pour some pinots. Gonna pour three pinots.

Andrea Morris [00:55:54]:
Perfect.

Thomas Bachelder [00:55:55]:
All from the bench again, because we’re here, and we’re gonna stay here. Right. We can do nine or leg, but I think let’s just. Cause there’s so much to explore here. And I’ll see you in a couple of minutes. I’m gonna go grab the bottles.

Andrea Morris [00:56:06]:
Perfect. Here we are at Pinot Land. One of my Pinot Noir in the boudoir, as they used to say on. What was that? That Kimmy show. That one. That was a Kimmy. The one that Timo Fey. Anyways, it was a Netflix show.

Andrea Morris [00:56:22]:
Yes. But Pinot Noir, one of my favorite wines. And I am so excited to taste yours, Mr. Boschelder.

Thomas Bachelder [00:56:28]:
Well, the Pinot Noir is very expressive of place because it has a thin skin. So. Because it has a thin skin. Remember, all the color for red wines comes out of the skin because the pulp of a grape is usually white. So when that pulp gives up its juice, it’s white. Ish. But the skin starts coloring it as it sits in the vat. So Pinot Noir has a thin skin, which means it rots.

Thomas Bachelder [00:56:56]:
And you need. Maybe it can rot. You might need a sorting table. But the great side of the thin skin, which doesn’t have a lot of coloring matter in it, and so you get lighter red wines, the great side is there’s not so much deep fruit that you can’t see where it comes from. Put another way, Pinot Noir really reveals sense of place, where it comes from. Well, so of the eight Pinots that we made in this particular year, we’re looking at three from Vineland. The Vineland bench, known as the 20 mile bench. All three of these are farmed by the same farmer.

Thomas Bachelder [00:57:41]:
Some different ownership there, but farmed by the same farmer treated the same way in the vineyard. And then all three are made by us. They’re. All three of them are less than 20 meters apart. It’s the soil that changes. So they’re called Wismer Park, Whismur Park, Wild West End.

Andrea Morris [00:58:03]:
I feel like I need a cowboy hat when I wear this.

Thomas Bachelder [00:58:05]:
And then Hank. Oh, you do? Absolutely. You do. Yeah. Well, you know.

Andrea Morris [00:58:10]:
And Hank, a vineyard I’m very familiar with.

Thomas Bachelder [00:58:13]:
So. So coming from the east to the west, it goes Wismer park on your left, class. And then 20 meters further, there’s the Wild west end of Wismer Park. And before we get to Hank, the third one, Hank is not necessarily the best, I can tell you. In some ways it’s the lightest and the prettiest. We’ve got two much more irony wines before. They’re not far from Wismer Foxcroft, which we had in game, except this is pinot on a similar red soil. Here we go.

Andrea Morris [00:58:47]:
Here we go. Diving into Wimmer park.

Thomas Bachelder [00:58:51]:
Both Wismer park, which, by the way, sells in London, and beautiful nose. Yes. And like the Foxcroft Gamay, it has that just a little bit of flintiness and ferric kind of rustiness.

Andrea Morris [00:59:07]:
And it does have a little slightly rusty taste, but without sounding like you’re drinking like iron well water. It’s like you can taste the minerality in it, right?

Thomas Bachelder [00:59:19]:
And you know. And you know, that’s so cool. And I say bloody because it’s irony. And sometimes people stop me and say, you know, that’s not great for vegans. And I go, I know, I know, I know. But listen, everybody has hurt their finger and then put it in their mouth. So everybody knows what blood tastes like. Even if you’re a total vegan, you’ve.

Thomas Bachelder [00:59:38]:
Cause it’s the human natural instinct to clean a wound. Dogs do it too. All animals do it. You know what blood tastes like? Blood’s full of iron. Sorry. That’s the way it goes. And these are full of magnesium oxide, which has an effect like iron to us. The question for you, but it’s not.

Andrea Morris [00:59:55]:
To say that it tastes like. Don’t think, listener, that it tastes like you’re drinking your own blood.

Thomas Bachelder [00:59:59]:
No, it doesn’t. Unless you’re a vampire, which would be iron knee. A deep and also almost an iodine taste. Now, the thing about Pinot noir, that.

Andrea Morris [01:00:08]:
Reveals itself but with a cherry hint.

Thomas Bachelder [01:00:09]:
To it, with a cherry hit like we’re leaving out the fruit. Sometimes people get so into what the stone tastes like in the sense of place sweepstakes that they forget to mention. And I just did the beautiful raspberry cherry cherry pit that’s in all these wines. And that’s part of the drug of getting into following where wines come from.

Andrea Morris [01:00:31]:
But it’s part of. It’s the homage to the land.

Thomas Bachelder [01:00:33]:
It is homage to land. And I started off when I went to wine school in Burgundy, southeastern France, making a pilgrimage there. Now people are making pilgrimages to Niagara, which is fantastic. It’s fantastic. And you know what? But you can. The cool thing about single vineyard wines is you can buy them in the LCBO or wherever you live in the world from anywhere. But we’re talking about Niagara. You can dream about tasting them, and then you taste them at the wine.

Thomas Bachelder [01:01:00]:
We were in your house. And then someday you say, I’m going to visit that vineyard in Tuscany, Italy, or in Burgundy, or you live over there in England, and you say, I’m going to go visit Wismer park in Canada. And maybe you never make it, maybe you do, because maybe you have other priorities, right? But the point is, even, and this is a great thing for your listeners, even if you never visit that vineyard you dreamed of visiting, to have it in your life. Grace is your life. You’ve. You’ve. You’ve seen it on a map. Maybe you’ve read about it in a book, maybe you’ve heard about it in a podcast.

Thomas Bachelder [01:01:35]:
So when you drink it, you believe it comes from that place. When you have it again from another vintage or another bottle of the same year, it’s reinforced that, oh, my God, this does taste different. So that’s all a big lead up that I didn’t intend to. Whismur Park, Wild West End, is called the Wild West End because it has a wilder flavor. In some years, people tell me it’s actually pretty. It’s not as wild as the first one, Wismer park, they are contiguous, but our plots of this vineyard that Wismer owns. Wismer bought the park vineyard, and they now manage it for years and years and years. Is the Wismer Park Wild West End wilder or not? This is the question for you.

Andrea Morris [01:02:19]:
You know, initially smelling was like blackberries, but also somewhat like nettles or something. Like, I could smell wilderness. And tasting it, it’s very fruity, which is odd for a pinot, but it also has a very earthy element to it.

Thomas Bachelder [01:02:40]:
It does.

Andrea Morris [01:02:40]:
It’s like drinking. It’s like you’re drinking like blackberries, but with. You don’t want to say dirt, but it’s because it’s just got that very earthy feel to it. Well, you know, really, this is a. This is a really unique and really beautiful Pinot.

Thomas Bachelder [01:02:56]:
It’s an expression of Pinot Noir that maybe not everybody would laugh. You go back to Park, Whismar Park. Does that seem more harmonious and less wild, or is there actually have a wild.

Andrea Morris [01:03:08]:
I actually don’t want to go back there right now. I’m like, well, stay where you are. I am, like, stuck in the Wild West. I’m at the saloon with the doors swinging open and some guy Coming in and go, hey, you want to play cards?

Thomas Bachelder [01:03:22]:
It’s the country music wine, you know?

Andrea Morris [01:03:24]:
No, it’s like, I feel more like. Like Deadwood, you know, like when you watch that and you’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Thomas Bachelder [01:03:30]:
Well, actually, the name of this comes from us going Team Canada of winemakers goes to London every year. There’s a place on Trafalgar Square called Canada House, and all the ex colonies have a house. And actually they’re immense mansions. I mean, ours has been valued at over 2 billion. One house, there’s no way we can sell it. It’s massive. It’s got two floors. And they give it to Canadian businesses to be able to promote Canada.

Thomas Bachelder [01:03:59]:
So 60 Canadian winemakers go from B.C. to Nova Scotia. And I was looking for a name for this different part of Wismer park. And I was walking through the West End of London that Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits calls the Wild West End. And I was ruminating on the fact that the Wild West End of London is not at all wild anymore. So I wanted to mark his song. It was when he was young and there was all kinds of stuff going down, but it pretty much pretty touristy now. And there’s other parts of London that are wilder, I guess.

Thomas Bachelder [01:04:35]:
So I decided, because the wine tasted wild, to name it the Wild West End, not of London, but of Wismer Park.

Andrea Morris [01:04:41]:
And it’s a great name. It’s a really. It does have that wilderness kind of taste. And to your question earlier, I did go back and try the Wismer after I tried that, and that made that seem fuller.

Thomas Bachelder [01:04:54]:
That’s it? I think so. It made Wismer park seem fuller.

Andrea Morris [01:04:57]:
Yeah, it made Wismer park seem fuller. Whereas this is a very full wine to begin with. Not to say that’s not a great wine as well, but. But I would say that in all the wines that we have tasted today, what makes them for me, even more enjoyable is your passion about winemaking.

Thomas Bachelder [01:05:15]:
Well, I.

Andrea Morris [01:05:15]:
Because I like. And I would hope that the listener, if you ever come here and sit with Thomas and have a wine tasting, you’ll understand that any price that you’re paying for these bottles is because you put so much of your heart and soul into this. It’s like if you’re a vampire, it’s like you’re drinking your blood because it’s like you are so much a part of these wines.

Thomas Bachelder [01:05:38]:
Well, there’s only also three barrels of Wild West End, and one usually goes into our Les Village blend. So we make 50 cases of this wine for the world.

Andrea Morris [01:05:48]:
Oh dear God in heaven. This is an amazing wine.

Thomas Bachelder [01:05:50]:
So Whismer park goes to the uk, but the Wild West End, named sort of after Mark Knopfler’s song, doesn’t go to London. It’s so funny. But the thing I want to say about Pinot Noir, which is very interesting, is you can drink Pinot Noir right out of the bottle young and it’s never going to stain your teeth and it’s never going to make you feel like I’m drinking this too young. But the thing about Pinot Noir is when you age it, it gets more complex and more ethereal and more perfumed and, and, or more woody or, you know, or more earthy. And that is what hooks people in, is that the way that Pinot changes and it’s because it has a thin skin. So these two were from red soil and they touch each other 20 meters apart. But across the alleyway, or what we call in winemaking the head viticulture, the headland, is Hank. Hank belongs to the King and Victoria Winery, as you know very well.

Thomas Bachelder [01:06:46]:
But it’s on whiter soil. And like in Burgundy, the whiter soil makes finer wines. Fine is good or bad. We talked about haute couture before. I appreciate that some people wear pret a porter and some people have tailor made clothes and I just have off the rack cotton, you know, and I like cotton in my shirts because I work in a winery. I like to move. I feel like the way when my body sweats that cotton feels against it, whether it’s long sleeve today or or short sleeve in the summer. But I, I am not blind to the fact that silk is a beautiful shirt.

Thomas Bachelder [01:07:24]:
It’s just that I don’t want to wear it. And like, so I will not get new cars and I will not have a super expensive house so that the money I do have. We talked about this concept of richness before is even if you’re not rich, you can be rich in a few very select areas. You can have the best music, you can have the wine you desire, you can go travel. But you have to be humble in other areas of your life. And for me it’s like clothing and cars. You know, I drive a beat up pickup truck and it sounds like a country song, doesn’t it? It does. I mean, my daughter just got back from Nashville.

Andrea Morris [01:07:59]:
That’s your Wild West End. Like I drive a beat up pickup truck.

Thomas Bachelder [01:08:05]:
So for folks, if you could remember one thing about Pinot Noir to your listeners, I would say it’s never a massive wine, but within the context of tasting a few Pinots, some seem massive.

Andrea Morris [01:08:16]:
Yes.

Thomas Bachelder [01:08:17]:
Just don’t pour a Cabernet Sauvignon on the same day. It’s like I said earlier about Gamay and Pinot. It’s like this. We’re in Pinot land now, and Pinot land has massive mouthfeel. But it’s ultimately light. Right. It’s ultimately Tinkerbell. Did you see Tinkerbell go by?

Andrea Morris [01:08:34]:
Yes, she flew by the Grand. She flew by that battle of gambling over there.

Thomas Bachelder [01:08:38]:
Exactly. So with Pinot Noir, you can dare to do something that I’m doing now, which is we’re putting after these two bruisers quotes. And we just said that Pinot is not often a bruiser, but these two more iron tinted wines, rusty wines that.

Andrea Morris [01:08:56]:
I know I can still taste the minerality in my mouth.

Thomas Bachelder [01:08:58]:
Yes. After these two wines like that, we’re going to pour one that is merely pretty. And if she. Tinkerbell here coming up. If Tinkerbell can defend herself after these two, then she’s really got her own core strength. And remember I said about Mary, she’s a ballerina. And I learned early on that ballerinas have more core strength than linebackers. Linebackers have a lot of core strength.

Thomas Bachelder [01:09:23]:
So here we go. The core strength of a Tinkerbell.

Andrea Morris [01:09:26]:
Here comes Hank. And she holds up.

Thomas Bachelder [01:09:30]:
I think she does. She’s got this dark raspberry tone. Definitely cherry to raspberry.

Andrea Morris [01:09:37]:
Very fruity. Less minerality.

Thomas Bachelder [01:09:39]:
I think less. Less of that. Certainly red soil minerality.

Andrea Morris [01:09:43]:
I think if you were new, if you were new to Pinot Noir, this would be the Pinot that you would like.

Thomas Bachelder [01:09:50]:
And I think so too. The fact that we had this last and we can say that means that somewhere. Whoops. Maybe it does have more complexity and it just needs more time. Cause I could have put it first and then you would have said, this is beautiful. Oh, now we’re at the real stuff when you get to Whisman Park. But instead, provocatively, we’re putting this last to say you stand up for yourself. Tinkerbell.

Thomas Bachelder [01:10:14]:
I should call it Hank. Hank Tinkerbell.

Andrea Morris [01:10:16]:
I can just imagine the guys from King and Vic listening and going, like you called our vineyard, Tinkerbell Wine.

Thomas Bachelder [01:10:23]:
By the way, it’s, it’s, it’s Rob Harold, he’s the Robin. And Joe Shank. And that’s where Harold Shank become Hank. It’s a contraction, isn’t it?

Andrea Morris [01:10:34]:
We do know that. Yes, we have. We sat with Them and tasted their lovely pinots as well. And cheers to you boys that are not Tinker Box.

Thomas Bachelder [01:10:43]:
They’re wonderful and they have a great, great vineyard site, and they’re great husbandry of those vines. And King and Victoria, I know it’s going to go from strength to strength. We share this plot of Pinot with them, but also with Adam Lowy and Matt Smith of Cloudsley. This is what we need. By the way, we’re touching on the collegiality. You need people doing the same plots. When you have what the French call a monopole, you’re lucky. Means you own the entire vineyard.

Thomas Bachelder [01:11:12]:
That’s great, but nobody else gets to try their crack at it. And when they do, the different social medias, the different wine writers, the different podcasts say, do you know Thomas? Marion Thomas? No. Wismer Foxcroft. Chardonnay that we had was good, but I think I preferred the Cloudsley version this year. The other reason, the point is, when you have people doing more than one person doing the same terroir, it lifts the rising tide, right? The rising tide. More people will hear about Niagara.

Andrea Morris [01:11:46]:
And it also makes you understand the craft of winemaking because we’ve tasted the Pinot Noir from Cloudsley and from King and Vic and from you from the Hank vineyard, and they’ve all had very distinct, different tastes. And that’s, like, so cool, because it’s all about the craft of winemaking. So true. It’s like the grapes may come from that vineyard, but it’s what you do with them as a winemaker. And that listener is. What is so freaking cool about wine is that it’s just this really. It’s like a chemistry set with grapes.

Thomas Bachelder [01:12:19]:
It is. It’s like you just. It’s an art.

Andrea Morris [01:12:22]:
That’s another podcast.

Thomas Bachelder [01:12:23]:
That’s another chemistry set.

Andrea Morris [01:12:24]:
That’s a chemistry set with grapes. That’s another T shirt.

Thomas Bachelder [01:12:27]:
Oh, God. It’s gonna be. Stay tuned, listeners. She’s putting them up on the site soon. Okay, so now you choose. Which one do we go back to after this?

Andrea Morris [01:12:35]:
I’m almost done.

Thomas Bachelder [01:12:36]:
Butterfly, definitely. You wanna go back to Tinkerbell?

Andrea Morris [01:12:39]:
I’m going to go back to Wild West End.

Thomas Bachelder [01:12:41]:
I would say. I don’t know, but I would say it’s going to seem even wilder after Tinkerbell, so.

Andrea Morris [01:12:46]:
Okay. Oh, yeah. I feel the rodeo. It’s a rodeo in my mouth. That’s fun. That’s, like, so cool.

Thomas Bachelder [01:12:56]:
So I just poured a little surprise for you, which is Gamay. I poured the Whismur FOXtrough again, it’s 100 meters away from this same terroir as the Wild West End and Park. Not the same terroir really as Hank. It’s a redder soil. The question becomes, is Gamay now tasting a lot rougher after the suave Pinot?

Andrea Morris [01:13:20]:
Yes.

Thomas Bachelder [01:13:21]:
Right.

Andrea Morris [01:13:21]:
It’s tasting like that bucking bronco.

Thomas Bachelder [01:13:24]:
So that is why we don’t listen, listeners, we.

Andrea Morris [01:13:28]:
I wish that I had a camera on Lucas’s face right now because his like eyes are popped out of his head and his mind is blown. That is like, it tasted like beets. Like almost like a different, a completely different wine after drinking.

Thomas Bachelder [01:13:43]:
I always say about Pinot and Gamay is they’re related, but game’s higher acidity makes it a little rougher, a little raw, but also a little crunchy fruiter. I said that earlier. So when you serve a bunch of complex Pinos and then a Gamay, you’re going to something raw. You’re going from the elegant 40 year old lady or man back to a teenager who’s like got the hair slicked back and having fun. So I would just say for your listeners, this podcast is not the one that’s going to tell you you can’t do this or that, but it might tell you you can do anything. Yeah, you can do anything. But you might want to try your gamme first and move to Pinot, you know, because Pinot with your main course and Gamay with your main course if you’re only having Gamay? Because why pit them against each other when they don’t play well in the sand blocks together?

Andrea Morris [01:14:39]:
It’s not the WWE of wine.

Thomas Bachelder [01:14:41]:
That’s right. Learn how to use them. And the other thing to do, which I must leave you with because this is another Burgundian thing, often in Burgundy, you serve your red wines first and your white wines after. So you do a bunch of barrel tasting, you go through your Pinots and then you do some, you know, you do some Chardonnay barrels and you leave with your mouth cleaned up and your teeth shiny because there’s no red in Chardonnay. I would say that at the dinner table, you’re probably going to start with a Chardonnay in our world, the Burgundian world, then go to a Gamay and then go to a Pinot, unless you had a Gamay first on the charcuterie plate, as we said earlier. But the provocative thing that we love to do, coming from Quebec but also France loves to do, is keep a half bottle of that, not a half bottle. But whatever is left in the Chardonnay bottle, bring it out. Instead of dessert, bring it out on the cheese course with a hard cheese.

Thomas Bachelder [01:15:39]:
Whether Conte, a local old cheddar. Bring that Chardonnay out. In this case, we had the Wismer Foxcroft or the Hill of Winfield. And just sip it slowly. At the end of the night with a little cheese, you’re going to be okay.

Andrea Morris [01:15:54]:
That just turned the world upside down.

Thomas Bachelder [01:15:57]:
There you go. Finish on last sip of Chardonnay with some cheese and you’ll be good. I guess we’re getting hungry.

Andrea Morris [01:16:02]:
Oh, my God, I’m starving. But this is like, Thomas, this has absolutely been beyond a pleasure to have this time with you to taste these wines to make T shirts.

Thomas Bachelder [01:16:13]:
Oh, yes. We’re up to number six now, you.

Andrea Morris [01:16:16]:
Know, so listener, we’re going to have to make these and put them available at some point. But you know what? It has been an absolute pleasure to spend time with you. Thank you so much.

Thomas Bachelder [01:16:24]:
Thanks for having me on.

Andrea Morris [01:16:25]:
We will have details on how you can contact Thomas and Bachelder or Bachelder Bachelder batch of wine.

Thomas Bachelder [01:16:34]:
Bachelder.

Andrea Morris [01:16:36]:
And we would love for you to like us, follow us, tell us, tell all your friends about this podcast because that is how we will continue to grow and we will continue to help the Niagara region and wineries like this keep in existence. Be sure to leave comments on our Instagram page, spillthewinepodcast, and please join us on our next episode. And I would just like to say to you, my friend, thank you for a wonderful time and cheers.

Thomas Bachelder [01:17:04]:
Cheers. So nice to have met you. And more power to your podcast as you slowly cross like an escargot, a Burgundian escargot through the bench. May you have lots of pleasure and spread the news. Cheers.

Andrea Morris [01:17:17]:
Thank you. Merci.

Thomas Bachelder [01:17:18]:
Merci bien.