Niagara Icewine Festival

My present to Matt for his birthday was to take him to visit some wineries in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Matt loves wine and going to wineries so I thought it would be something that he’d really love. We often visit the Lake Erie North Shore wineries here in Essex County, but we’ve never tried any in Niagara so we were pretty excited.

We hit the road on Saturday morning for the 3 hour drive through snow and sleet. We hit up 7 different wineries. Seven. I know that sounds like a lot, and with normal tastings we would have both been completely shitfaced after visiting seven wineries.

But this wasn’t a normal wine tasting. We got tickets for the icewine festival so at each winery we went to we tasted an icewine that was paired with a dish.

Icewine, if you’re not familiar, is a very sweet dessert wine made from grapes that were picked after they had frozen on the vine. When the grapes freeze the sugars concentrate so the icewine has the most delicious sweetness. It is phenomenal.

(click on any of the pictures to make them bigger)

Niagara College

The first winery we hit up was the Teaching Winery at Niagara College. I really liked their tasting area and felt slightly jealous of the students who got to go to school there and learn all about growing grapes and producing wines. Sounds way more fun than my math degree.

We didn’t actually have any icewine here but we tasted the 2007 Dean’s List Meritage which was a really good full bodied red. I might have bought a bottle if it weren’t $50(!)

Chateau des Charmes

Next stop was Chateau des Charmes, a huge, classy joint which was definitely the fanciest winery we’ve been to. Here we had an icewine cocktail paired with a New York Cheesecake and a Salted Chocolate Cheesecake. The latter of the two was probably the most delicious cheesecake I’ve ever eaten. I wish they would have served us the icewine straight up so I could have tasted what it was like, but the cocktail was delicious.

Southbrook

Southbrook was a really impressive winery. It was the number one winery that I wanted to visited because it is a biodynamic and organic winery. They don’t use synthetic fertilizers or pesticides in order to maintain the integrity of the soil. They even have chickens and sheep (my favourite animal!) that graze between the vines and naturally fertilize the vineyard. So cool.

We sampled their cab franc icewine paired with an icewine cannoli. I can’t quite remember the flavours of the icewine, but I remember thinking the cannoli shells were really tasty.

Cattail Creek

Next we went to Cattail Creek which is a much smaller winery that reminded me of the smaller scale wineries here in Essex County. They paired their vidal icewine with butter chicken and mango chutney which was cool since I’m used to icewine served with dessert. I found that their vidal icewine wasn’t as sweet as I like my icewine to be, but it was still pretty good.

Read part 2 of our Niagara-on-the-Lake adventures here.

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• Niagara Icewine Festival Part 2
• Trainwrecker Beans
• day 132: sip into summer