Days of Wine & Chocolate

This event is slightly different from the icewine festival, which allowed passport holders to visit any 6 wineries from Beamsville to Niagara over three weekends in January.  This touring pass only includes the 28 Niagara-on-the-Lake wineries, but you can visit each of them once and have all 4 weekends in February to do so.  According to the festival's website, touring passes are available only at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Chamber of Commerce, but en route we discovered you can purchase them at any of the participating wineries.

 We're starting to learn some things about participating in these festivals.

• Dress for what will be comfortable inside the boutiques; I've taken to leaving my coat and other winter-wear in the car. I'd rather be uncomfortably cold for the 30 second jolt across the parking lot than uncomfortably hot for the rest of the visit.
• Bring some water bottles for the car. It's easy to forget that you're consuming 1-2 oz of alcohol at each stop and I've ended a few of these tour days with a wicked headache. I might add Advil and maybe bread or crackers to the packing list too.
• Drive vigilantly. We met a couple today who had toured all 28 wineries in two days without hiring a car service. (Note that we have yet to see a RIDE program and assume that the OPP looks the other way on Niagara's biggest - read "only" - industry.)

We visited 4 wineries today: Inniskillin, Pondview Estate, Ravine Vineyard, and Chateau des Charmes.  Our purpose was to learn more about Ontario's Cabernet Franc, constantly comparing them to the 2009 Tawse Grower's Blend that absolutely wowed us.  Before reviewing any one of these visits, I thought I'd summarize our day, so the table below ranks our experiences at each winery across 5 different dimensions with 1 being the best rank.

	The Wine		The Winery		The Event
	price*	rank	staff	feel***	chocolate	passport value
Inniskillin	$22.95	3	4	4	1	1
Pondview	$15.20	n/a**	3	2	2	2
Ravine	$18.95	2	2	1	3	3
Chateau des Charmes	$13.95	1	1	3	4	4

*By comparison, the Tawse 2009 Grower's Blend Cab Franc was $25.70 per bottle.
**Pondview served a rose; comparing to the other 3 wouldn't be meaningful.
***Overall atmosphere