Day 2 of Wine and Chocolate

On the second weekend of Wine and Chocolate, Chris and I decided to spend our quality-together-time with other people.  He went to visit his sister in Toronto, and Carrie came with me to four wineries that she picked based on their descriptions in the touring pass.  I'll begin with our very disappointing, but also very informative visit to Diamond Estates.  After this, Diamond and I will be going our separate ways.

First of all, its location is not a pleasant visit for a festival; it looks and feels more like a roadside fruit stand than a winery boutique.  Second, we didn't enjoy its wine and chocolate offering at all.  The server prepared cocktails of its 20 Bees Brand sparkling wine and late harvest vidal, a 4 and a 10 on the sugar scale, respectively.  Now to begin with, the proportions were all off; similar cocktails I've tried have had relatively much less bubbly and much more dessert wine.  Not that this mattered much, though, because Diamond's chocolate pairing was a white chocolate truffle with a creamy pomegranite flavoured ganache center, easily 10X sweeter than the cocktail, and made the drink taste even more bitter.  Although I usually appreciate when a winery sets up a private room for festival tasters, in this case it made not liking the wine even more awkward.  Carrie suggested later that the winery should have provided spitting buckets!

My real reason for giving up on Diamond, though, is that we learned it has officially discontinued the East Dell brand Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc, arguably the two best wines it produced, so as to avoid brand confusion amongst the several labels that it bottles.  It plans to continue with its Black Cab and Summer Rose, the former which I never liked as much as everyone else seems to, and the latter which I'm just going to replace out of spite!