It's Not Toronto - But It Is The Niagara Wine Tour

On June 15th we (the kids and me) sent off for the Wine Tour. We left at about 8:15 am - going along Lake Shore Blvd, the Gardiner and the Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW) before we ended up in an hour and 20 minutes at the Hilton hotel. Believe or not, at 9:40 am we were checked it to the hotel! Very nice. It was sunny and warm and we drank coffee, tea and fruit outside in the patio.

At 10:30 am a van showed up and we were taken to the Niagara Wine College for a little education on wine.  Our tour guide, Josh, was knowledgeable in the art of wine and he was a student before landing this job. We went out to the winery, with all the wine vines growing and, in another place, talked about there stemming and seeded the new grapes. Josh explained how they are putting the grapes in a stainless steel rotator to extract the skins. White wine they remove the skins and red wine they soak it with the skins for awhile but eventually they winded up in barrels or stainless steel bins.

The flowers among the leaves

The grape vines all snuggled in a row

The Barrels

After, we tried the wine. We are looking at the for color, sniffing the wine, swirling it around in the wine glass and, of course, tasting it. We had white, red and icewine.

And then we went for lunch on a beautiful patio called the "The Old Winery Restaurant". The restaurant had a huge clay oven and I ordered my pizza and salad. It was really good!

After lunch we made it to "Reif Estate Winery", "Caroline Cellars" and "Diamonds Estate Winery".

Reif Estate Winery was purchased as a plot of land on the Niagara river. Ewald Reif brought the wine plants for Neustald, Germany along the Rhine River Valley in 1977 and began producing wine in 1983.  I had never been to Reif Estates and I'm impressed with the Wine Sensory Garden - "to explore our Wine Sensory Garden to ponder the colours, aromas and flavours characteristically used to describe wines. The gardens are designed to complement and reflect the heritage of our original 1870's Coach House". We also saw the huge barrels of wine, there not used very much, but the are HUGE.

We went out for dinner at Treadwell/ Farm-to-Table Cusine in Port Dalhousie. The father, Chef/Owner Steven Treadwell and his son, James Treadwell, the managing director of the restaurant, make this one of the finest restaurants in Canada.

The Soup

The Main Courses

We had wine and cheese outside on the patio and watched the full moon rise above the trees.

And from there we heard about the Vancouver/Boston Stanley Cup Game.... we arrived at our hotel just to see it finish.

The next day we went down to Niagara-on-the-Lake to tour around, drink coffee and eat gelato. We had to make it to our Lailey Vineyard at 12:30pm. The three of us went on a tour inwhich the guide talked a great deal about Lailey's smallness and the difference it makes to the wines.

Then we came home....