By Sandy Kemsley
Prince Edward County, or "The County" as it is known to all who visit
or live there, isn't the first place that comes to mind when I think
about wine. About 200km east of Toronto along the north shore of Lake
Ontario, it's an insular, sleepy area of small towns and farms,
although recently quite gentrified by "city people" buying up cottages
or creating fancy B&B's.
My parents are both from the county, and my grandparents; in fact,
my family's time there dates back to the American Revolution, when some
Loyalist ancestor of mine decided to head north for Canada. Although I
was born and raised in Toronto, I spent all of my summers in the county
with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Later, my parents bought
a place down there and retired, so I visit a few times a year to see
them but usually don't do a lot of sightseeing.
This time, however, I had a friend visiting from Australia and
wanted to show her around a bit. On a previous visit, I had taken her
to Niagara where she fell in love with ice wines, so it took little
persuading to plan a little trip to the county and to a few of the
local wineries. I hadn't visited any of the wineries before and I asked
for advice from my fellow AWS board members: the recommendation came back for Waupoos Estates (which, I believe, is the oldest in the county at a mere five years), and The Grange, an up-and-comer. We decided to throw in a visit to The County Cider Company, where I had visited before, to taste their dry ciders and see the view from their terrace.
The Grange has a beautiful country setting, down a road among
farms, and their tasting room is housed in a restored barn from 1830:
original wood beams, a high peaked roof panelled in wood, and huge
windows looking over the fields. The tasting bar itself is a slab of
curly maple, a delight to drink on. 2003 is the first vintage of this
family-run winery, and they're still making wine with a significant
proportion of Niagara grapes while the local production builds. We
tasted a few wines, and I wasn't making notes so am not completely sure
of the vintages so have just listed the wines without the year:
- The Trumpour's Mill Riesling was a very pleasant dry
Riesling with lots of fruit on the nose. I bought a bottle of this to
take home.
- The Trumpour's Mill Gamay Rosé was a complete
winner, a dry, Provençal-style rosé similar to those that I had been
tasting in Provence a few months before. Not complex, but an
easy-sipping wine for a hot summer day; I grabbed a couple of bottles
of this and we drank it all that weekend.
- The Trumpour's Mill
Gamay Noir was a disappointment, although not entirely unexpected for
red wines from a new winery, I found this very tannic and not very
drinkable at this point. I'm not enough of a wine taster to predict
whether it would improve with age; I tend to think that it's worth
returning to the winery in a few years and trying the reds again, but I
won't be drinking them right now.
- The Trumpour's Mill Cabernet, like the Gamay Noir, was a disappointment.
Worth the drive, especially for the rosé, but I'll be
avoiding their reds for a few years. I also found it odd that they
charged us for the tastings even though we bought three bottles of
wines: most wineries that I've visited in other regions waive any
tasting charges if you make a purchase.
Our next stop was at Waupoos Estates Winery, where we tasted some
wines and stopped for lunch at their restaurant. I have to admit that
Waupoos has the strangest array of varietals that I have ever seen: I
can't figure out if they're incredibly inventive or just crazy.
- The Vidal, which I have mostly tasted as a late-harvest
or ice wine, was made as a dry wine, and I don't think that it worked
very well. I found the flavours that are so deliciously complex in a
dessert wine to be overpowering and odd in a dry wine.
- The
Seyval Blanc was quite nice, crisp and dry with quite a bit of fruit.
Although I didn't buy any, I would definitely drink this again.
- The
Baco Noir was very young, although showed promise even to my relatively
uneducated palette: lots of structure, some leathery notes and quite
tannic but not unpleasantly so.
- The Merlot (2003, I believe)
was the winner here: drinkable now but would stand some cellaring, a
lovely, rounded wine with still a lot of fruit in it. We liked this so
much that we drank it for lunch at the restaurant as well.
I
highly recommend the restaurant at Waupoos Estates: it's a gazebo on
the lawn by the lake, with vineyards on either side. I had a very
flavourful smoked duck salad, followed by a pecan-caramel tart that
totally blew any semblance of a diet.
We returned to the shop after lunch where I purchased a bottle of the
Merlot for that night's dinner, and my friend bought a bottle of their
ice wine for her cellar in Oz.
We finished our mini-tour with a trip to the County Cider Company.
I remember visiting this place a number of years ago, before there were
any wineries in the county, to taste their Premium County Cider: a dry
sparkling cider with an alcohol content of 6.5%, quite nice on a summer
day. The place has expanded significantly since then: instead of a
small room off the porch, they have a proper shop and tasting room,
plus a terrace at the edge of the cliff where they are perched with a
view down over the properties below (including Waupoos Estates) and the
lake beyond. This was more of a novelty stop than a true tasting,
although we did dutifully taste all of their ciders. My friend from Oz
picked up a bottle of their ice cider to take back with her, and we
grabbed a bottle of their sweeter peach cider for those back at the
cottage who didn't like dry wines.
I'll definitely try out a few of the other wineries on my next trips
down there, and look forward to the day when some of these wineries
increase their production to the point where we can buy their wines
here in the big city rather than having to drive to the county for the
pleasure.
Cross-posted on the Australian Wine Society of Toronto blog.
Brrr. This morning I took the pooch out to pee and noticed frost on the ground. It seems winter is trying to infringe on autumn - my favorite time of year. Why do I adore fall? For some primitive reason, when the weather cools and leaves begin to yellow, I crave roasted foods. With apologies to my vegetarian friends, I heartily crave slow roasted meat. In addition to roasted culinary delights, autumn unleashes my passion for brooding, gnarly red wine. As I happily strut around in my favorite fall sweater, I scoff at the silly little reds in my wine cabinet. I want red wine with structure and attitude. Thankfully northwestern Italians share my passion for red wine in autumn. This region of Italy is called the Piedmont and its bold red wines are killer (in the colloquial sense). And it just so happens that they all begin with the letter, “B”: Barbera, Barbaresco, and Barolo.
Just one photograph from a whistle stop tour of the Languedoc and Rhone regions of France. This was taken in Faugeres, somewhere north of Pezenas... not too sure where exactly as we were a little lost.
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