Category: Ontario

Does it bother you when you are visiting a winery in another province, enjoy their wines, and ask them to ship you a case back to your home, and they can’t?  Provincial politics gets in the way and prevents the free flow of our wine between our borders.  Sometimes it is easier to get wines from other parts of the…

Cool climate areas are prime areas for making elegant sparkling wines.  Champagne is a cool region in France, and is well-known for their sparkling wines, for example. In Canada our sparkling wine industry has been booming in my opinion.  As I am in BC, I see a great growth in sparkling wine production, and I have seen sparkling wines from…

Where is Prince Edward County?  Is it somewhere on Prince Edward Island?  No, it’s in Ontario, between Toronto and Kingston, along Lake Ontario.  I would classify it as a peninsula, but it is not long and thin, rather it is more circular in shape.  And it’s a very cool climate area in Ontario; cooler than the Niagara region.  It’s so…

While attending the International Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration (i4C) I tasted a small lot Chardonnay, 2015 vintage, by Thirty Bench Wine Makers from the Beamsville Bench in Ontario.  That wine stood out among the other Chardonnays that I had tasted at i4C.  So once the i4C was over, and I had some time to visit a few wineries, I made…

After spending a weekend tasting Chardonnay wines at the i4C Celebration in Niagara-on-the-Lake, it was time for me to visit some wineries in the Niagara region on my own, and try other grape varieties as well.  I visited two wineries on the Beamsville Bench.  My first stop was Peninsula Ridge Estates Winery.   It is on a small rise and has…

As promised I have enclosed my tasting notes for the wines I sampled at the three International Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration seminars.  Many of these Chardonnay come from Ontario, but there are also wines from BC, California, Chile, France and more.  My notes are not as detailed as notes I make from my structured tastings at home, but should give…

Don’t we all love sparkling wine, whether it is high end champagne, or cremants, cavas and more? At the third of the International Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration seminars, we learned more about how dosage affects sparkling wines aromas, flavours, and balance.  This was a bit more technical in details compared to the other earlier seminars, but well worth it.  Sparkling…

This was the second seminar in our three seminars on Day 1 of the International Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration.  This seminar’s goals according to the organizers are to answer the following, “Winegrowers love Chardonnay for its versatility. 10 winemakers will defend the stylistic decisions they make with each vintage, from homages to Old World classic styles to innovative interpretations that stretch the…

Vines grow in soil.  The roots reach deep and bring in water and nutrients.  Soil matters, but how much, and is there a best soil type for Chardonnay? Are there particular flavours and aromas that can be associated with different soil types? This School of Cool seminar at the i4C, has set out to discuss, but not necessarily definitively answer…

The Seventh Annual International Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration (i4C) has wrapped up in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.  It was a series of seminars, lunches, and dinners that filled an entire weekend from July 21-23, 2017.  I was privileged to be invited to attend this event; coming from British Columbia.  We are also a cool climate region, and I was glad to see…