It’s ok if you haven’t had a chance to taste our wines yet! Here are some tasting notes, reviews to give you an idea!

Mixed half case for $100 and Mixed Case of 12 for $175, Free Shipping (for details see: http://grangeofprinceedward.com/2012/02/01/2053/)

Rosé 2010 has a beautiful bright pink hue, with lively lemon-lime, strawberry, cherry on the nose. The palate is ripe berry, fresh citrus and a little sweetness- bold flavors.

2009 Rosé is the lighter, softer sibling of our two rosés. It has the same flavor profile as the 2010 but in a soft and subtle tone. The two rosés are nice compliments to one another.

Rosé Review:

“This vibrant pink wine blends Gamay and Pinot Noir. Enticing notes of red cherry, cranberry, floral, and strawberry-rhubarb. Dry, medium bodied, with a tangy red-fruit core and tons of bracing acidity. A touch of ripe tannin lends structure. This is a serious, mouthcoating rosé that’s built for food. Try it with green salads, turkey breast, or braised-chicken kebabs.” (VINTAGES panel, April 2011)

2007 Chardonnay has a soft yellow hue, with a nose of lemon, pear, yellow apple, melon. The flavor profile is lemon and pear with nice crisp mineral finish. The ideal classic, dry-style white.

Chardonnay Review:

Vic Harradine- winecurrent.ca
“Crisp and refreshing, this delivers a nice stream of ripe tree fruit along with a welcomed gentle line of moderating acidity without a splinter of oak. Golden Delicious apple, red licorice-infused melon and hints of mineral meld perfectly with hints of spiced citrus fruit on the palate. Sip on its own or pair with steamed mussels Provençal.”
2007 Pinot Noir has bright, garnet red hue. The nose is cherry, strawberry, cranberry, spice. The palate is sour cherry, soft strawberry, spicy cranberry with earthy tea leaves or tobacco and leather. A great, rich-earthy red.

Accolades: BRONZE- Canadian Wine Awards Pinot Noir 2008

Pinot Noir Reviews:

“This wine has the key requirement for Pinot Noir: it smells like Pinot Noir! Earthy, with floral and sour cherry notes. Light-bodied and quite tart, with sharp acidity on the finish. It is a lean pinot, but not green, with enough fruit. Light and pretty, with decent length.” (Wineaccess.ca )
“Garnet hued, this offers classic aromas of beetroot, red cherry, cranberry and smoky vegetal, herbal notes. Dry, light bodied and taut, the aromas replay on the palate riding a wave of vigorous acidity. Hints of roasted peppers and garden herbs persist on the dry finish. Decant prior to serving with herb-roasted lamb.” (Susan Desjardins)

2008 Brut Rosé Tasting Notes: The berries in this vintage were of ideal ripeness resulting in fruit with excellent balance in sugar and acidity. The 2008 Brut developed a rich rosy color with a silver halo and a sound mousse with lovely little bubbles. It shows a nose of baked apple, fresh brioche and earthy cherry. The palate is ripe apples on entry, lemon zest through the mid-palate and finishes with cherry-cranberry fruit and focused minerality; typical of the terroir of our farm.

Brut Rosé Reviews:

“This classically made Pinot Noir-based sparkling wine is proof positive that sparkling wine has a great future in PEC. It is arguably the best wine in the Grange’s increasingly fine portfolio, with amazing poise, tension and depth. The aromatics and flavours are all very subtle and almost simple with vague Pinot cherry, light toast and mineral, but it is the way they combine and their excellent length that are most memorable. Expect tense, steely, razor-like acidity. Great value and it should age a decade. Rating: 91”

David Lawrason April 2011 County Grapevine Magazine

“Rating 90: By far, this is the county’s best bubbly to date, and possibly Ontario’s best sparkling Rosé. Two years of aging on the lees, have given the wine a yeasty overtone which combines with strawberries and earth. In the mouth, the same yeast and strawberries combine with cranberry fruit. It is delicate with very crisp acid and excellent length. Kudos to winemaker Jeff Innes and Grange!”

Evan Saviolidis

“Bubbly, blubbly, toily and troubly … while it does take a lot of toil and trouble to make good bubbly, drinking it can be a totally divine experience, especially when you put your hands on a good one.  This Brut from the Grange is made from 100% Pinot Noir grapes that spent 20 months ageing its way to bubbly nirvana.  It’s Rosé so it has that lovely pink colour, you’ll find it refreshing, crisp and clean – it has a slightly sweet mid-palate that tastes like a mix of strawberry and peach then ends with a citrus tang and linger on the finish. The County really is a great place to make good bubbly and this is yet another good example. Rating: ****+”

Michael Pinkus: http://ontariowinereview.com/

“if you won a bottle of brut rosé, what would you do with it?”

post your answer on twitter or facebook and be entered to win a bottle of brut rosé, sent to you!

when- feb 1-10th

call to reserve your spot! 613-339-1048 x 23

Happy Holidays from our family to yours!

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September fifteenth to September twenty-first: Sparkling Wine

First day. early again, but this time only by about a week. The last couple of brix always seem to sneak up on us so without much chance to do finally preparations we’re off to the races. Sparkling wine gives the worst impression of harvest. Acid levels are high, sugar low. Picking is slow as we’re selectively going through the vineyards. Processing is slow because we have to hand fill the press, and while whole bunches so it can only take a quarter of the usual. Luckily, picking probably takes 4 times as long as well. But by the time the press its going, it’s clear that this is a bumper year for sparkling. The chardonnay juice has never been better. And after three days of work, we’re onto pinot. One would expect the pinot noir to provide the bigger challenge than the chardonnay, but comparing the two is like night and day. Clean, evenly ripe fruit row after row. We picked two and a half blocks of pinot to make this year’s brut upwards of 60-70% pinot noir, and the rest going to a beautiful brut rose base.

After six days, here’s what we had to show: 18 bruises, 1 bee sting, missing a working finger, 5000L of juice, 16 x 5 x 15kg hurled over my head, but we’re all still in high spirits. So far so good.

The next question is fermentation…

I was pushing for a style that we had never tried before; and with my limited experience I was solely basing this idea on what I had read out of books. But I was convinced. we had always done the latter, and this year, with it being Caroline (my mom) and I’s first year, she was not convinced it was the year for straying from the norm. But I wanted to make this vintage our own. I wanted to come back to wines when they were done and taste something different from previous years. After several motivational speeches on my part, my way won out. It was only then that I realized that the pressure of the outcome of our most popular white label wine was all on me… and the stress kicked in.

Rookie wine-making experience: pinot noir needs less pressing than chardonnay when going into the sparkling. 2011 is going to be mother-of-pearl. If you think it’s a charming feature, I’ll gladly take the credit.

September twenty-fourth till September thirtieth: Sauvignon Blanc

Happily we have moved the sauvignon blanc to an earlier pick slot than last year (which was whenever we had time).  This year it was the first of the still wines to be picked. As a result the crop was fresh, clean and a dream to work with. Too bad we only have 2 acres planted. With cool fruit and a chilled fermentation, the freshness of the fruit shines through; so much white grapefruit. When doing my 7am alcohol tests it went great with breakfast.

October fourth till October eighteenth: The Rush

It happens to us every year. The chardonnay, pinot noir and gamay all ripen at the same time; ending up with a window of 6 days to do 14 days’ work. This season started with chardonnay, the vine that was enjoying the rain the least. Luckily for us it was a relatively quick pick as the bulk of the sorting had happened during the sparkling pick. Then a rain day, which we productively used to research wiccan spells to control the weather. Then pinot; there was no hesitation on our part to get it out of the field. October was already shaping up to be a hard month, as we weren’t about to make it any harder on ourselves or our vineyards; we were going to be while everything was clean and the quality was high. We decided against a hand-sorted white label pinot noir this year; and the reason was time. There was great fruit out there, but the longer it took to get it out of the fields; the less great fruit there was going to be. And that went for all varieties, at only two weeks into harvest, we were already getting backed up. Typical harvest schedule.

For gamay, it had been our plan for months to get a supplemental crew in to harvest so in our minds the pick was going to take a day or two tops. However, this didn’t happen. A thousand excuses were made to us, but at the end of the day none of it mattered, all that mattered was that we had one day to do what had then become about five days’ worth of work. there was nothing to be done but to get at it. In between my winery chores I would go out and pick a few lugs, but it didn’t make a difference. The harvest was going to take as long as it did. And then the rain; from a beautiful perfect week to pick the pinot (thank god) to an utterly dismal week to harvest gamay; the stress was starting to hit home. We try to remind ourselves again and again that you can’t let the weather get you down; because there is nothing you can do to stop it. But I must have spent hours feverish scribbling plans for a machine that could trap the vineyards at a moment’s notice… but the weather system eventually passed, and harvest went on again as usual, and in the backs of our minds we knew we were luckier than lots of folks to have started picking when we did.

The End: Final Notes

Harvest ended October 29^th at 3pm. We crushed the last batch of cab franc and were leaving it to soak for a period. But by then we were in a routine, it hardly changed to be finished with the crusher as there was so much else going on. Well into two week of pump-overs for the reds, which we were still doing three times daily, we hardly had a chance to think about anything else in a day, except maybe how is there temperature of the reds, how is the alcohol, how is the color extraction etc. I couldn’t even remember which tanks had the whites from the first week in them… ultimately all the reds got between 15-20 days skin contact. Great color, great depth of flavor; undoubtedly worth the work.

I am going back to Montreal in a few days, and I joke that I won’t miss the farm at all. And although I was undoubtedly grateful for the break, I clearly would spend time wondering what’s going on back home right now…

Over the winter there will be racking and bottling for the whites, there will be barrel aging and malo of the reds, so this isn’t really the end of the project at all…

sorry we’re late! it was a long harvest!

Announcing this months #grangesociallife wine winners! Winners win a bottle of wine that they can pick up at the winery!

Twitter:

Each winner gets a bottle of Trumpour’s Mill wine!  e-mail us at info@grangeofprinceedward.com to claim your wine winnings!

Keep posting for more chances to win!