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.
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