NIAGARA COLLEGE
Orange is the new white at the Niagara College Teaching Winery

Applied learning got an ancient twist at the Niagara College Teaching Winery, in the making of a natural Orange wine that marks the debut of a new Underground Series.

The newly released 2017 Underground Series Sauvignon Blanc is the College's first venture into Orange wine - a term that refers to wine made from white grapes fermented in their skins, as is typically done with reds. It uses an ancient practice, which dates back thousands of years, of burying the grapes underground for natural temperature control, with very little intervention.

The result is a natural wine free of sugar, preservatives or additives, boasting flavours unexpected in a Sauvignon Blanc. With complex aromas of ripe apple and jackfruit, dried chamomile, turned earth, honey and juniper, the Underground Series Sauvignon Blanc is dry on the palate with fine tannins, a fresh acidity, and a flavour profile that can stand up to heftier food pairings.

College winemaker and instructor Gavin Robertson noted that the unique, natural wine would appeal to enthusiasts of the local food movement and naturally fermented foods, as well as oenophiles seeking the atypical. However, its beauty is more than grape-skin-deep at the Teaching Winery; it's about expanding student exposure to unconventional wines and winemaking methods.

"Creating this natural, experimental wine was an opportunity to open our students up educationally to ancient, low-tech winemaking methods," said Robertson, who graduated from the College's Winery and Viticulture Technician program in 2011. "It's a very labour intensive process and our students were at the heart of it all - from burying the wine underground and digging it up, to bottling it."

Made from 1.5 tons of 2017 Sauvignon Blanc grapes, the wine was de-stemmed, and bucketed by hand into underground tanks, then sealed and buried ahead six feet underground in the campus vineyards in September 2017. It was underground for seven months through the winter to ferment spontaneously with the wild yeast in the vineyard, monitored by temperature probes installed at various depths, with help of from NC's Research and Innovation Division. In May 2018, the wine and skins were dug out by hand and drained through a traditional vertical basket press. The highest quality free run wine was racked twice to clarify, then hand bottled, unfiltered, with no preservatives or additives.

It was a memorable learning experience for second-year Winery and Viticulture Technician student Robbie Day, who experienced the challenges of working with wine in an underground vessel and helped to hoist the wine from the underground tanks using a bucket on a string. "I have strong respect for how difficult winemaking was before the introduction of modern equipment," said Day. "By the end of the day, I was covered in Orange wine, rain and mud but it was totally rewarding."

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