Tasting Note – When I tasted this small batch wine at the Canadian Culinary Championship in Ottawa in January, I was struck by its energy and wildness. It is from purchased fruit from one of Niagara’s top vineyards sites, Grimsby Hillside. This is a dry, medium bodied cab franc that is juicy and savoury, with classic varietal aromas of tobacco, dried herbs and smoke, combined with a harmony of red and dark berry fruit. I love how this wine is both nimble and lively yet generous and structured with 13.5% ABV. Very good length and quite beguiling. Drinking well now though I reckon it will develop well over the next decade. Tasted January 2026.
Backgrounder – Maenad is the virtual wine project of Yvonne Irvine, who has been the assistant winemaker at Creekside wines since 2008, since graduating the winemaking program at Niagara College. The mythical Maenads were the female followers of Dionysus, Greek god of wine, who were known to partake and break into ecstatic dance as part of their rituals. You need only check out Irvine’s Instagram to see that she loves dancing and is a Maenad at heart. This project was born during COVID with the debut vintage in 2020. While Irvine makes other varieties and doesn’t have a set portfolio each year, cabernet franc is something that has stuck with her in recent years. She sees cabernet franc as a core variety for Niagara with the Grimsby Hillside Vineyard being a special site yielding exceptional examples of the variety. All the right things go into this wine – hand picked grapes, wild fermentation, minimal sulfur before bottling, unfiltered and unfined – just about as low intervention as you can get. Irvine respects and admires the vineyard’s co-owners Paul and Frank Franciosa’s commitment to sustainability and organic growing, on this site where cabernet franc ripens easily and produces wines with real depth and complexity.
