St. Catharines Wine Tasting of 2005

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The St. Catharines Wine Tasting of 2005 was a blind tasting of four named growth Bordeaux and twelve Ontario Cabernet and Cabernet blends held at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, on February 27, 2005.

The fifty judges in the wine competition were wine writers, wine educators, vintners, and certified wine judges. They ranked the wines as follows:

Rank Region Wine

1 Ontario Colio "Carlo Negri Signature" Cabernet-Merlot, 1999
2 Ontario Thirty Bench Benchmark Blend, 1998
3 Ontario Stoney Ridge Cabernet Franc-Merlot, 1995
4 Ontario Cave Spring Cellars Cabernet-Merlot, 1998
5 Ontario Henry of Pelham Cabernet-Merlot Unfiltered, 1998
6 Bordeaux Chateau Branaire-Ducru, 1999
7 Bordeaux Chateau de Camensac, 2000
8 Ontario Konzelmann Cabernet-Merlot Reserve, 1998
9 Ontario Inniskillin "Klose Vineyard" Cabernet Sauvignon, 1995
10 Ontario Reif "First Growth" Cabernet, 2001
11 Bordeaux Château Lynch-Moussas, 1996
12 Bordeaux Chateau Haut-Bages Liberal, 1995
13 Ontario Hernder Cabernet Sauvignon Unfiltered (500 ml) 1999
14 Ontario Chateau des Charms Cabernet-Merlot, 1999
15 Ontario “Little Fat Wino” 2003 Landot Noir, 2000 Cabernet Sauvignon (amateur)
16 Ontario Cilento Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve 1999

Neither price nor geographic origin was associated with ranking. For example, the third-ranking entry (an Ontario wine) was significantly less expensive than the twelfth ranking Bordeaux wine.

The results for the Canadian wines are impressive, especially given the fact that most of the wineries from which they came had been making wine for fewer than twenty years. Their competitors all came from chateaux that had acquired prestige high enough by 1855 to have been included as Fourth and Fifth Growth in the Bordeaux Wine Official Classification of 1855 as the best in Bordeaux.

It has been argued that that Bordeaux wines don’t achieve their full potential for years and that a re-tasting should be conducted in 2015. The same argument was made against the results of the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976, in which blind French judges ranked a California red higher than all its prestigious Bordeaux competitors. However, when the competition was replicated ten years later in two separate blind wine tastings, California wines increased their rankings (see French Culinary Institute Wine Tasting of 1986 and Wine Spectator Wine Tasting of 1986). In the 30-year anniversary re-tasting (The Wine Rematch of the Century), California wines increased their rankings further and won the top five rankings out of the field of ten [1].

On the basis of this evidence there's no reason to assume that the Canadian wines would not age at least as well as their Bordeaux competitors. They might age much better, as did the California wines, but no one knows for sure what a re-tasting in 2015 would reveal.