Cuvee en Route

Every year during the first weekend of March, Niagara's wineries show off their best wines during a three day event that starts with a Friday evening gala and turns into what is probably the region's best wine tour of the year.  For a passport price of $30, each guest can visit every participating winery over the thee days.  Each winery then offers three tastings.  The wines on offer are of a much higher quality than those typically exhibited for festival weekends, and are not always available for tasting or even for purchase.  One hostess we visited called Cuvee, "the Oscars of the Niagara Wine Region."

Left to right: Chris, Jan, Erin, Jeff, Brendan, Francesca, and Wesley.

In my opinion  the event is not well publicized.  Last year, we missed it altogether.  Not to make the same mistake again, we began planning our route back in January!  Three more couples, two house guests and one limousine later, and we were well situated to best take advantage of the high value and rare tasting opportunities.  Our route (Thirty Bench, Henry of Pelham, Stratus, Strewn & Inniskillin) covered 5 different sub-appellations, and a selection of reds, whites and dessert wines, ranging from 2-15 years old.

Wesley's wife, Megan, had to work.

 After the tour I had each taster rank the 5 wineries we visited on 3 criteria: wine quality, staff and atmosphere.  There are, however, a few problems with reporting the results, possibly because by the time we were writing things down, we'd each tasted 16 different wines.  For starters, Brendan seems to have thought we'd visited a 6th winery.  Next, Wesley's ranking system requires its own cipher.  Perhaps most importantly, though, the wines were all different types, varietals and ages, and all of a very high quality, and thus no clear pattern emerges from the data.  So instead, as I blog about each visit over the next week or so, I'll do my best to incorporate everyone else's thoughts.

He got over it.