Bench winery receives nod as top winery in Ontario
- Luke Edwards
- 4 hours ago
- 6 min read
WineAlign awards honour The Organized Crime Winery with coveted distinction
By Luke Edwards
He could have been a grape grower, or he could have been a winemaker. Instead, Greg Yemen chose option three: Both.
While his job at The Organized Crime Winery on the Beamsville Bench is technically winemaker, the Niagara College grad’s job takes him out into the vineyard just as much as it does inside the winery. That’s because he and owners, the husband and wife team of Ania De Duleba and Edward Zaski, have a belief that good wine starts well before the grapes find their way indoors.
“If you don’t have good, ripe grapes, you don’t have good wine. You can’t fix that in the winery,” Yemen said.
That theory seems to have some merit, since the winery took home this year’s award as the top Ontario winery at the WineAlign awards, finishing above Niagara-on-the-Lake’s Peller Estates winery and nearby Fielding Estate Winery, which finished second and third, respectively.
The winery has been among the top finishers at the competition previously, and De Duleba said they know their “small but mighty” winery has been pushing out high quality wines for several years now. However, since they’re quite small she said Organized Crime can sometimes get overlooked.
“We know we do good wine here, but I think our thing is that we’re really underrated,” she said.
“Sometimes people don’t realize the calibre of our wines.”
Despite previous top finishes and confidence in what Yemen is producing, De Duleba said there was some surprise when the awards were handed out. For starters, finishing above so many other quality wineries is never a given. It also came as a bit of a surprise that their chardonnay took second fiddle to a wine not commonly associated with the Bench.
Instead, the winery received its second ever platinum award thanks to its 2022 Bordeaux blend they call “The Download.”
“We’re told a lot that we can’t grow good Bordeaux reds on the Bench, you know, save that for the Lakeshore or the Niagara River. But I think (2022) was a very classic Bench year. A very good level of ripeness, not overripe, not underripe, just perfectly ripe. Which doesn’t happen very often,” said Yemen.
The chardonnays weren’t totally forgotten, though, with the winery’s 2022 and 2023 Sacred Series Cuvee Krystyna wines winning gold medals. Their 2022 and 2023 Limestone Block chardonnays, 2022 Break-In pinot noir, and 2024 rose also won golds to go along with four silvers and three bronze winning wines.
De Duleba said the WineAlign awards are the only competitions they enter, in part because their blind testing puts wineries big and small on an equal footing. She also said it’s important to enter some competitions as it gives them a benchmark to compare themselves to.
She and Zaski took over the winery from De Duleba’s mom and step dad, Jan and Krystyna Tarasewicz right as the COVID-19 pandemic hit. In fact, De Duleba said they were set to put their Toronto home on the market the day Premier Doug Ford shut everything down in Ontario.
It had never been their plan to take over - both had successful careers in Toronto - but things changed a few years earlier when Krystyna lost a long and hard fought battle with cancer. De Duleba began commuting down from Toronto to help out at the winery.
Krystyna and Jan opened the winery in 2007, after purchasing the property in 1999. The name may evoke thoughts of goodfellas and godfathers, but it’s actually a play on an actual event that took place in the area. De Duleba said way back in the early 1900s there were two Jordan Mennonite churches.
“One of the churches decided to get a pipe organ and started playing it in their church. And the other Mennonite community was offended by it. They thought it was sinful, evil, and prideful. (The second church thought) you’re only supposed to use your voice in the church,” De Duleba said.
“So the men, in the dead of the night, drove over there, broke in, stole the pipe organ, loaded it onto their buggies, took it down to the Twenty Mile embankment in Jordan and the chucked it down the ravine.”
Hence the name The Organized Crime Winery.
At the time Jan and Krystyna purchased the property it was an old orchard filled mostly with dead and dying pear trees. They built the vineyards and winery from scratch, with Zaski and De Duleba helping when they could.
They began planting vines in 2000 and made their first wine in 2006, before opening as a winery the following year. Between her help during those years and several Wine and Spirit Education Trust courses she took, De Duleba had a decent understanding of what it took to run a wine business.
However, it still took a few years after her mom died for the family to decide how to proceed. Ultimately she and Zaski opted to purchase it from her dad.
They did make some changes when they took over. One of the biggest was hiring Glen Elgin Vineyard Management to help out in the vineyards. While they continue to do a lot of work in-house, having Glen Elgin come in at crucial times has helped improve quality and production of the vineyards, De Duleba said.
Even with that help and her background, De Duleba said the learning curve was extremely steep, and running the winery continues to be a job that requires a ton of devotion.
“Everyone has this idea that it’s like this bucolic lifestyle and we’re skipping in the vineyard with a glass of wine. And they don’t realize that, at the end of the day, we’re farmers, first and foremost," she said.
And as farmers, she said they maintain a healthy respect for the land. They aren’t organic and do use sprays, but De Duleba said they use other efforts to minimize how much spray is needed. Those efforts include keeping the grass between the vines neatly cut, pulling the leaves off and keeping grapes separated to maximize air flow and reduce the likelihood of disease.
And about 90 per cent of their harvest is done by hand, a gruelling job but one that allows them to ensure only the best grapes get turned into wine.
They dedicated a block of chardonnay to De Duleba’s mom, calling it the Cuvee Krystyna. It only made sense for it to be chardonnay.
“We named it after my mom because when you came to the winery, she would make you drink chardonnay whether you liked it or not,” De Duleba recalled fondly.
“So we thought it would be appropriate to name it after her. She loved chardonnay…And we feel it’s Niagara’s best grape, in terms of wine.”
It was from those grapes that Organized Crime won its first platinum award back in 2017.
They also have a block of pinot noir dedicated to Jan.
“His last name is Tarasewicz, which is unpronounceable, so we shortened it to Tara,” De Duleba said.
The winery has essentially maxed out what they can do on the 40 acres of land they call home. They have about 25 acres under vine, though there is a small patch in the front of the property that De Duleba said could be used to plant more vines. They pulled out the gerwurztraminer vines that were previously in the field because they weren’t surviving the winters too well.
Otherwise, De Duleba said the plan is largely to keep doing what they’re doing to produce well made, handcrafted and artisanal wine. One goal is to get more of their wine into the LCBO, which remains the key space for consumers.
Niagara made a clean sweep in the top Ontario wineries category at the WineAlign awards. The Okanagan Valley’s Mission Hill Family Estate won the top winery in the country award.
Inniskillin’s 2023 Riesling icewine got top honours in the icewine category and received a platinum award.
Other Niagara wineries that took home platinum awards included: Black Bank Hill for its 2022 cabernet franc, Byland Estate Winery for its 2023 Riesling icewine, Fielding Estate for its 2023 cabernet franc, Niagara College for its 2022 Dean’s List cabernet franc, Nomad at Hinterbrook Winery for its 2021 Wanderlust, Palatine Hills for its 2024 Ramblers Schmoozer cabernet merlot, Peller Estates for its 2023 Signature Series Riesling, Thirty Bench for its 2022 Small Lot Riesling Triangle Vineyard, and two from Trius: the 2022 Grand Red and 2023 Showcase Riesling Ghost Creek Vineyard.
All the awards, and more information, can be found at winealign.com.
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