A couple of other wineries on the Niagara Peninsula offered food to their visitors—a barbecue and a picnic table, perhaps, set up beside the vineyard on summer weekends—but On the Twenty was the first actual winery restaurant. I was impressed with the ambitious cuisine when I tried it back then, and even more so by the implicit leap of faith Pennachetti was making concerning the region’s future.
Ten years on, his prophecies have come true. So many new wineries open up here every year that it’s hard to keep track of them all. Today, they number more than 60. Some are major concerns with impressive international sales and state-of-the-art facilities; others are small operations producing limited amounts of highly sought-after wines. (Daniel Lenko, Lailey, Malivoire, and Kacaba are names wine geeks should bear in mind.)
Pennachetti’s Cave Spring complex is still one of my favorites. Located in the sleepy little hamlet of Jordan, its restaurant, winery, and gift and antiques shops are housed in an 1870 apple warehouse the size of a city block. Behind the building, the land plunges down into a wooded ravine, where Twenty Mile Creek twists its way out toward Lake Ontario, and across the street stands the luxurious Inn on the Twenty, the brainchild of Pennachetti’s wife, Helen Young, and the best home base for visitors intent on exploring Niagara’s western reaches. At the other end of the spectrum is Daniel Lenko’s operation. His retail store, for example, is located in his mother’s kitchen. The last time I was there, buying a case of his juicy, elegant Chardonnay, I also left with her recipe for apple pie.
Wine is the heart and soul of the region’s appeal, and, almost without exception, the best bottlings can only be found by visiting the wineries. A flurry of exceptional vintages (1998, 1999, 2002) proved that Ontario could make deep, rich reds as well as crisp whites (thank you, global warming), while the ever-reliable Canadian winter ensures an annual supply of ice wine. Pressed in the coldest months from grapes left to shrivel and then freeze on the vine, the intense, complex, tangy, supersweet elixir first put Ontario on the world’s wine map in 1991, when Inniskillin’s 1989 Vidal Icewine won the Grand Prix at Vinexpo, in France.
Fans of the golden dessert drink flock to Niagara in the New Year for the annual Icewine Festival, but that is only one of many such gatherings. In the high summer and fall, it’s hard to find a weekend that isn’t busy with some kind of oenocentric fiesta. Meanwhile, the larger wineries compete with one another, offering alfresco jazz, Shakespeare, or culinary events, along with the gamut of vineyard tours, hayrides, and barbecues. Itineraries are available at farm-gate and roadside fruit stands and at every stop on the Wine Route, the meandering road that links most of the region’s wineries.
First-time visitors are advised to follow the route, though even old Niagara hands run into trouble in its middle section, where the college town of St. Catharines splits the region in two. I always seem to lose track of the helpful blue road signs as I enter the suburbs, ending up too far south, beyond the frontiers of wine country. Which isn’t such a bad thing. The countryside around Pelham, Effingham, and the Short Hills Provincial Park is as beautiful as the Cotswolds in England, with rolling hills and deep combes, horse farms, antiques shops, and unexpected tearooms. (Sometimes I wonder whether my wife hasn’t engineered these “accidental” detours.)
The last time we found ourselves aimlessly driving the winding roads of St. Catharines, we happened upon the Henry of Pelham winery. Its president, Paul Speck, led us from his office, situated in a handsome 1842 building that once served as an inn, to the edge of one of the vineyards, half shouting to be heard over the roar of a tractor driven by his younger brother Matthew. In 1984, the Speck family was living in Toronto when his father, Paul Sr., decided to throw his hat into the world of wine and plant vineyards on family land in St. Catharines. With no experience of growing grapes (or making wine, for that matter), he shuttled his three young sons—Speck, the oldest, was just 17—down to the family land every weekend to plant.
“For years, while we were sitting out there toiling away in the ninety-degree heat, I was hoping the vines were going to grow bottles of beer,” Speck said, surveying his field with a smile. How things have changed: Today, Speck is an outspoken advocate of Canadian wines and even serves as vice chairman of Ontario’s wine overlord, the Vintners Quality Alliance.
West of St. Catharines, the Niagara Escarpment, a great gray curtain of cliffs and wild woodland that is the wine country’s dramatic backdrop, draws closer and closer to the lake, squeezing Niagara’s many elements together. The lakeshore itself is a wasted asset behind the six-lane barrier of the highway and its attendant light industry. At this point along the Wine Route, villages seem to merge, the vineyards and orchards crowding together. But any feeling of claustrophobia vanishes when you turn south off the route and venture along the road that climbs away through the vine-covered benchlands and rises toward the escarpment. Suddenly, you’re back in the depths of rural Ontario, pausing to buy cherries from the end of a farmer’s driveway or to taste the first vintage of a new winery not yet on the map.
The Details
Staying There
The Charles Inn (Niagara-on-the-Lake; 905-468-4588; www.charlesinn.ca; from $162) has an older, more modest ambiance, with deep-set screened verandas and views of the golf course. The inn (previously The Kiely House) has been closed for renovation and is scheduled to reopen this month.
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