Big Head Wines big Nebuchadnezzar bottles
I knew nothing about Ontario’s Big Head Wines until it was suggested to me to visit by Talia Mendelsohn from the Bacchus Group Inc. in Toronto, but this winery in particular truly impressed me with their wines and their winemaking methods. If you ever get a chance to visit the Niagara region, do not miss visiting Big Head Wines. The winery has been in business for ten years.
Andrzej Lipinski is a self-trained winemaker, while his son, Jakub (a certified sommelier still going higher in his somm certification) and his sisters run the sales and marketing of the wine.
Jakub Lipinski talking to me about their wines (note the concrete tanks behind)
One of the different things about this tasting is that Jakub made me taste the wines blind, so I did not have any bias as to the type of grape(s) used in the wines presented to me. Jakub waited for me to write my notes before we discussed the wines. I put winemaker notes for most of the wines, as the methods they use to make the wines are not that common. Some methods that separate their wine-making are the extensive use of whole-cluster carbonic maceration for the initial fermentation, followed by destemming and traditional fermentation, and the extensive use of dried grapes, aka appassimento in Italy. They like to do a slow drying of their grapes under cool temperatures. All wines also undergo full malolactic fermentation. Their goal is to
This Article was originally published on My Wine Pal
