Pillitteri Estates Winery, 2012 Exclamation Cabernet Franc, VQA Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada
Cab Franc du Jour #101
Pillitteri Estates Winery is a generational family wine business in the truest sense of the phrase. Gary Pillitteri immigrated to Ontario from his native Sicily in 1948, and following his marriage to Lena Argo in 1960, the couple purchased a small farm and settled in Niagara-on-the-Lake in 1965 with their three children, Connie, Lucy, and Charlie. They cultivated tender fruit and naturally planted some grape vines as well. In 1988, Gary experimented by making his first Vidal Icewine, which won a gold medal at a local competition and cemented the idea that a life of grape growing and winemaking in this emerging region was the path forward. These were the humble beginnings of what is now one of the most significant wineries not only in the Niagara Peninsula but across Canada. The winery is today collectively run by three generations of the Pillitteri family, farming around 100 acres of vitis vinifera and hybrid varieties.
How It All Started…
This wine marks the 100th1 Cab Franc du Jour since this project officially launched in October 2020, and it felt only right to return to where it all began. When people ask how my love of Cabernet Franc started, the answer always leads back to the Niagara Peninsula and Pillitteri Estates. My first job in the wine business was Export Manager at Pillitteri Estates, a role I started in August 2007 and held for seven and a half years.
Our primary focus abroad was Icewine, Canada’s calling card in the global wine world, and I was fortunate to travel to dozens of countries during those years, introducing people to our exciting, emerging region at a time when very few others were doing so. But in nearly every market we entered with Icewine, we always brought along a still white and red, and Pillitteri’s flagship red was Cabernet Franc. It was a grape we could ripen consistently every year, make a definitive and distinctive style from, and it offered a real point of differentiation in markets flooded with Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Pinot Noir.
Travelling the world talking about our Cabernet Franc naturally launched a deeper curiosity about the grape. I tasted as many Niagara examples as I could find. At trade shows like ProWein and Vinexpo, any break from our stand would find me in the Loire Valley section working through as many examples of Chinon, Bourgueil, St-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil, and Saumur-Champigny as I could manage in half an hour. If there was a Cabernet Franc on a wine list anywhere I travelled, I was ordering it. And so began an obsession with this humble grape.
Moving to the United States in 2015 accelerated that exploration considerably. In the world’s largest wine market, free from government monopoly restrictions, a Cabernet Franc from virtually anywhere could be found at the click of a mouse. The spark that began in my own backyard in 2007 with wines like this one grew into an insatiable passion that eventually fuelled this project when I returned to Canada in October 2020.
Exclamation Cellar Series
This wine comes from Pillitteri’s Exclamation Cellar Series, their reserve tier. One thing I have immense respect for at Pillitteri is that they only produce reserve wines in the best vintages. Given the considerable vintage variation the Niagara Peninsula experiences, parcels designated for reserve wines in less favourable years are declassified into the entry-level Cabernet Franc rather than being labelled up. The 2012 vintage was exceptional, exceptional enough in fact that the winery produced two tiers of reserve Cabernet Franc that year: the Exclamation Series and the Family Reserve.
The Four Mile Creek VQA Sub-Appellation
The wine is sourced from 5 hectares of vines across three vineyard sites in the Four Mile Creek VQA sub-appellation, one of four sub-appellations that make up the Niagara-on-the-Lake regional appellation. The sites all sit at around 90m above sea level and, while appearing flat to the eye, slope ever so slightly to the north. Viticulture Director Jamie Slingerland describes these three sites as sitting in something of a sweet spot within Niagara-on-the-Lake: close enough to Lake Ontario to benefit from the warmth the lake radiates in fall, delaying frost risk and extending ripening, but far enough from the water to avoid the cool spring and fall breezes that can impede vine growth and ripening.
The bedrock across the entire Niagara-on-the-Lake regional appellation is Queenston Formation red shale. The topsoils are all glacially derived and vary in depth, texture, and stoniness depending on location. Across all three vineyards, the topsoil is a sandy silt-loam known locally as Halton till, ranging from as little as 30cm to upwards of 90cm in depth over a clay-loam subsoil, providing a good balance between moisture retention and drainage.
The Vineyard
The Cabernet Franc vines were planted between 1992 and 1997, putting them at an average age of around 17 years at the time of the 2012 vintage. Clone 214, the Loire clone, is used exclusively. The vines are trained using the Pendelbogen system, a variation on double Guyot in which the canes are arched to provide more buds. Jamie notes this not only helps protect yields in the event of frost by providing more buds to draw from, but also gives more flexibility during cluster thinning later in the season, which is critical to achieving the fruit-to-canopy balance that minimises pyrazines in Cabernet Franc.
In the Cellar
The fruit was hand-harvested, destemmed, and crushed. Fermentation took place in stainless steel with selected yeast, with approximately three weeks of maceration. Aging took place in a combination of new and used French oak barrels for approximately 20 to 24 months before bottling.
For those curious about the label: in 2006, the family commissioned the creation of 23 stainless steel chairs that now hang in the barrel cellar, each telling a chapter of the Pillitteri family story, past, present, and future. The label depicts a rendering of the king’s chair.
Wine Details
Producer: Pillitteri Estates Winery
Region: Niagara Peninsula, Ontario
Appellation: Niagara-on-the-Lake VQA
Vineyards: Mazza, Puma, Pillitteri
Soils: 30-90cm of Halton till (sandy silt-loam topsoil), over a clay-loam subsoil, Queenston red shale bedrock
Alcohol: 13.5%
Apparently I miscounted somewhere and this video was actually Cab Franc du Jour #101! But I only realized this after the fact. Still, a good opening for the next 100 videos!