The Globe and Mail

It’s been a sultry, thirst-inducing summer in Southern Ontario. But connoisseurs of local wine have only begun to salivate as Niagara begins to crush what is shaping up to be one of the best growing seasons on record. Grape pickers are out in full force this week in one of the province’s earliest harvests ever.

“We started picking on Friday,” said Harald Thiel, vigneron-proprietor at Hidden Bench Vineyards and Winery in Beamsville, Ont. “I think we’re getting great maturity levels.”

An early start to the grape harvest augurs well for the cool-climate region, particularly for late-maturing red varieties such as cabernet sauvignon and merlot, which struggle to reach full ripeness most years.

At Château des Charmes in Niagara-on-the-Lake, picking started on Aug. 25 for pinot noir grapes destined for sparkling wine.

It was “certainly the earliest, by about a week, that anyone on our production team can recall, and there is a lot of institutional memory with our production team,” said Michèle Bosc, the family estate’s director of marketing.

Hot days, which yield high sugar levels, combined with cooler nights that preserve acidity spelled a nearly ideal summer. And while the season’s ultimate success depends on relatively clear skies over the coming weeks, some say 2010 could trump 2007 as one of the best vintages ever.

“The great thing this year is [that] we got rain when we needed it,” Ms. Bosc said. “This is a stark contrast to 2007, when we had drought conditions and vines were stressing and shutting down.”

The first wines from 2010 will arrive in stores several months from now, starting with short-aged whites such as riesling and gewurztraminer. Those will be followed by oak-aged whites such as chardonnay in about a year, and finally the full-bodied reds, which can spend 12 to 24 months maturing in barrel.

In the meantime, though, consumers can taste the fruits of something else that’s swept across the Niagara landscape in recent years: change. New, outstanding wineries such as Hidden Bench and Megalomaniac have sprouted, yielding some of the peninsula’s most impressive premium offerings, as my recent swing through the region showed.

At the same time, several long-established estates played musical chairs, trading cellar talent and tweaking styles to coax out flavours to better reflect the region’s soils and microclimates.

Jean-Pierre Colas, a Frenchman who moved to Peninsula Ridge winery 10 years ago, jumped last year to boutique producer 13th Street and was replaced by Jamie Evans, formerly of Stonechurch Vineyards. Marco Piccoli, an Italian now at Jackson-Triggs, and Bruce Nicholson, a Niagara native who recently moved east to Inniskillin from Jackston-Triggs’s Okanagan Estate in British Columbia, are hitting their strides.

“We’re really seeing the strength of the winemaking across the region,” Mr. Thiel said. “They are getting numerous vintages under their belt and are expressing the terroir of the region really well.”

And there have been more recent shifts whose results won’t be seen for some time. Thomas Bachelder, who crafted many of the country’s best pinot noirs and chardonnays, recently left Le Clos Jordanne to start a consulting business that will see him work with a host of other wineries. He’s been succeeded at Le Clos by Sébastien Jacquey, formerly Le Clos’s assistant winemaker. And Marc Bradshaw of Pillitteri is scheduled to leave his post soon and will be replaced by Alex Kolundzik, the VQA winemaker at Vincor Niagara Cellars.

Here’s a selective snapshot of the new Niagara. Most selections are available only directly through the wineries.

Angels Gate (Angelsgatewinery.com, 905-563-3942).

Winemaker Philip Dowell arrived in 2007 after a peripatetic career in Canada and his native Australia. The former chief winemaker at Australia’s celebrated Coldstream Hills), he moved to Niagara in 1998 to work at Inniskillin and has lately become a champion of Niagara’s sparkling-wine potential. “I’m seeing a lot of the yeasty characters [in chardonnay] that you see in Champagne,” Mr. Dowell told me.