And The Winners Are…
The first year students of the Niagara College Winery and Viticulture Technician program have just completed their first big project of the school year. Known as the “Chardonnay Project”, this assignment gives the students a sneak peek into the wine world. The students are first divided into partners and each pair of students gets to make their own batch of Chardonnay, and each is given a different strand of yeast. Because different yeasts will give different flavor characteristics when added to various grapes it is important that the students have paid attention to how they must go about making their Chardonnay for it to result in an excellent wine.
The project does not end there; the student’s wines are all entered into a blind taste test, where they are judged by their fellow classmates and professors. To start the wines are put into groups of six, each partnership will go around and taste the wines in the groups and rank them from first to sixth. Whoever has the two highest rankings in each group makes it to the finals. In the finals the wines are rearranged and the students all taste again and determine the winners.
This year’s winners were Patrick Garrett and Fredrico Holton-Anderson, runner-up went to Rebecca Muessle.
“We don’t have set criteria for what we judge we are strictly looking for quality,” Says Terence van Rooyen, winemaker, professor, and judge for the competition.
At the end of the day the project is about, “showing me they know how to make wine,” van Rooyen says. The students will still be graded on their documentation of the processes that their wine went through. “If a wine has a fault, the student must be able to tell me why, I want to make sure they know what went wrong, and how to prevent it from happening again. That is where the academic part comes in.”
“The students get so excited about the project, and cannot wait to showcase their work,” van Rooyen says of his class, “I look forward to this project every year, and this year did not disappoint!”