Winemaker Jean-Pierre Colas is hunched over one of his prized barrels in the cellar of Vignoble Rancourt, a tiny, little-known estate in Niagara-on-the-Lake. He draws out a sample of inky-purple merlot with a glass tube and releases it into a tasting glass. Then, as a reporter starts asking sensitive questions, he gets up on something else he’s fond of – a soap box.
“Cabernet sauvignon is heresy, a crazy, stupid idea,” he says, dismissing the late-ripening grape as ill-suited to Niagara’s cool climate. “If you have one ripe year out of 10, what do you want to do with the other years?”
His contempt for underripe cabernet sauvignon and Niagara’s addiction to the grape is just one in a litany of lamentations that have made him something of a pariah in the region since arriving with a splash at Peninsula Ridge Estates Winery in Beamsville, Ont., from his native France in 2000.
Pinot noir, the grape some of his colleagues champion as Niagara’s great red hope? “I’m not convinced,” says Mr. Colas in a thick French accent, decrying the vast majority of local pinots he’s tasted.
And don’t get him started on Ontario’s Byzantine wine-industry standards, largely overseen by the Vintners Quality Alliance (VQA), or the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. They tend to favour big-volume producers over small-batch craft winemakers, he says.
It’s not the kind of talk one normally hears from Ontario’s generally collegial winemaking community, at least not on the record. But now Mr. Colas is beyond the caring stage, having departed Peninsula Ridge last year after a clash with owner Norm Beal over commercial direction and Mr. Colas’s vocal disdain for the LCBO.
“He had a bit of an attitude problem and that hurt our business,” Mr. Beal says. “I think the LCBO are and can be great partners for our industry.” (For the record, Mr. Colas says he left of his own accord, while Mr. Beal says the divorce was “mutual.”)
Mr. Colas, 48, is now splitting his time between two smaller estates, consulting to fledgling Vignoble Rancourt and, more notably, acting as chief winemaker at 13th Street Winery, a distinguished boutique operation that recently changed ownership.
If my recent sampling of the forthcoming offerings at 13th Street and Vignoble Rancourt are any indication, he could be writing the first page of a dynamic new chapter. In the meantime, he’s also clearly getting a kick out of working closer to the soil, at least as big a kick as he’s been getting out of flinging mud. “I feel more happy, I feel more independent,” he says.
Despite his flair for button-pushing, Mr. Colas isn’t easily dismissed. Prior to joining Peninsula Ridge, he had for 10 years been head winemaker at Domaine Laroche, a large producer in Chablis.
While there, he garnered Wine Spectator Magazine’s White Wine of the Year distinction for a grand cru chardonnay, Domaine Laroche Clablis Les Clos 1996, which scored 99 points out of 100 in a blind tasting. Another Chablis, Blanchots Reserve de l’obedience 1996, took top honours in a tasting conducted by another U.S. publication, Wine Enthusiast, similarly scoring a near-perfect 99.
That experience in northern Burgundy’s cool climate served him well at Peninsula Ridge, then a new estate, which soon began producing some of the best sauvignon blancs and lean, Chablis-style chardonnays in Canada.
“I think he’s a first-rate white winemaker,” says Tony Aspler, author of The Wine Atlas of Canada and Tony Aspler’s Cellar Book. “I think that his white wines [at Peninsula Ridge] generally were better than his reds. He had a great feeling for white wines.”
Unlike most of his colleagues in Canada, Mr. Colas didn’t get his start at oenology school. He arrived at Domaine Laroche as a vineyard labourer, eventually apprenticing under the previous winemaker of 15 years. “I’m from the old school,” he says with a smile. He also did brief stints in South America and New Zealand.
