WTN: Thomas & Vaughan Chardonnay 2000

Niagara Peninsula.

Note: This is a tale about what can happen when you buy some wine, put it in your wine cellar and forget about it.

Very dark yellow in the glass.

An odd nose of brown sugar and veggies.

Smooth, very vegetal (asparagus I believe), lightly tangy, very sweet.

An odd, sickly sweet-vegetal finish.

Pretty sad. Might have been not bad four or five yars ago.

Actually, Bruce, although this wine is clearly showing accelerated aging as per your note, I have had spotty experiences with T&V in the past - including on the friendliness side of things, but that's another story.

They used to make quite a nice Foch and had a decent Dechaunac some years back, as well as an intriguing late-harvest Catawba called "Old Gold" - the only wine of its kind in all of Niagara. It got discontinued around 2001 I think.

They switched to plastic corks at some point and I always had a problem with weird aromas in their wines after that. The winery is no longer on my list of places to visit.

Thanks for the insights Paul.

To be honest, I was surprised to discover, after a quick search on Google, that the winery is still in operation. I can't recall the last time I saw a T & V wine on the shelves of the LCBO.

T & V is still in operation, but I suspect that they, like many other Ontario wineries, have given up on the LCBO ... probably because the LCBO has given up on them.

Despite being an arm of the Ontario government, the LCBO is nowhere close to what I think it should be doing to promote the home turf. Not that I have anything against access to wines from all around the world (with exceptions, of course; many wines that could be featured never are), but there should be more constructive favoritism for the products of this, our soil.