WellnessOptions Magazine issue09 - Life energy & fatigue

According to a widely held notion, red wine is the most healthful form of beverage alcohol because of its rich content of polyphenolic antioxidants. An alternative hypothesis states that red wine drinkers are the most healthy segment of beverage alcohol drinkers because they are better educated and are dedicated to a more healthy life-style than consumers of other beverages. In other words, it is not the drink but the drinker that counts. By David Goldberg

Whether true or not, the latter statement can, with much justification, be extended to wine-makers, a fellowship that includes many Physicians and members of other Learned Professions. One has only to think of Dr. David Bruce in California, Dr. Max Lake, and Dr. Christopher Penfold in Australia, and the trio of Dr. Zenzen, Dr. Loosen and Dr. Burklin Wolff from the Rhine Valley. To this list must be added our own Dr. Tom Muckle who came to the Department of Laboratory Medicine at McMaster University from Newcastle Medical School in North-East England in 1970 and whom I first met at the Toronto Wine Tasters Society in the late 1970’s.

As the leader of a consortium that included other doctors, chemists, and engineers, he purchased and planted Thirty Bench Vineyard in 1980 as a source of quality grapes for the Niagara Wine Industry. Six years later, conjointly with philosophy graduate Angelo Pavan (PhD) and businessman Len Penachetti, he founded Cave Spring Cellars in Jordan, severing his connection in 1991 to begin winemaking at Thirty Bench the following year. It was only two years later after being shuffled between various Ministries, the LCBO, and the LLBO over a 14-year period that a license for the sale of commercial wine was actually issued, during which time Muckle and his two partners Yorgos Papageorgiou (Professor of Mathematics and Geography at McMaster University) and Frank Zeritsch (an award-winning amateur winemaker) had to pay out large sums in upkeep without a cent coming in.

On a stretch of the Beamsville Bench that provides one of the driest microclimates of the Niagara Peninsula, selected with the advice of a celebrated consultant from the German Wine Institute, this tri-national trio (English, Greek and Austrian, respectively) focus their expertise on the selective production of Rieslings and other regular table wines, both white and red (Muckle), Reserve Reds and Chardonnays (Papageorgiou), and Icewines (Zeritsch). As a consequence of terroir (the character of the soil), severe cropping of the vines to reduce yield, hand-harvesting of choice grape bunches, minimal use of pesticide sprays, and careful barrel selection (usually French oak, although tight-grained Northern Ontario Oak is gradually being introduced), they are making some of the most intense, complex and flavoursome wines to be found anywhere in the Kingdom of Bacchus.

As with many Niagara wineries, family participation and pride counts for a good deal of the success achieved. Fiona Muckle, her father’s daughter, has taken on the role of General Manager, while the wives (not to mention other daughters, cousins, and visiting nephews) are heavily involved in all the chores of the harvest. The notes that follow will describe my tasting experiences during a recent visit to the winery that put me in mind of an old Scottish proverb that could, with a stretch of the imagination, be applied to its founder, even though he was born on the wrong side of the Border: mony a mickle macks a muckle which, translated means many little things make a big thing. Persistence pays, and so it has for Tom Muckle and Thirty Bench.