The Harvest Experience
At The Grange of Prince Edward, one of the County’s premium wine-making operations, harvest is a cause for celebration and hard work — and it's a community affair.
Each year, Caroline Granger and her daughter Maggie, owners and winemakers at the Grange, invite the members of The Grange Wine Club and those who have adopted a vineyard, to a special harvest day. It’s a celebration of all the hard work that has gone into getting the grapes to this point and a moment to acknowledge the hard work of actually making a good wine that is to come.
Caroline’s parents bought the farm in the 1970s and it’s been 18 years since Caroline planted the first vine — “and we’re only just at the point now where we really understand enough,” she says. She’s being modest, of course, because the Grange of Prince Edward has been making good quality wine from its own grapes for years now.
On a damp morning in early October, 2017, about 40 wine club members gather in one of the tasting rooms inside the magnificent Grange barn. While we wait for the rain to stop, we are tasked with blending wines to create our own, and designing a label for the bottle. It’s a surprisingly difficult challenge, given the limited quantities of each varietal. It gives us all an appreciation for the tricky job of a winemaker whose annual challenge is to produce a blended wine with only so many ingredients and a limited quantity to play with. Next we head down to the bottling machine in the basement where we are taught to disgorge a bottle of sparkling wine and then cork, cap and label it.
Meanwhile, there’s the appreciative chatter of wine lovers who have come to taste some of the Grange’s finest in the magnificent converted barn, now a wine-tasting and sales room. The soaring space, complete with harvest tables, mismatched chairs and enormous windows looking out over the vineyards, is a lovely place to appreciate the sweat and tears that go into producing a good bottle of wine.
For several years, the Grange has been supplying picnic baskets for clients to take out into the vineyards to enjoy al fresco with a bottle of wine. Now, DISH Catering and Events from Ottawa has opened County DISH in partnership with Caroline and Maggie. It is providing farm-to-table food on the lovely stone patio on weekends and full-service catering for events, prepared by Ottawa’s own Jamie Stunt and Tom Wade. Mouthwatering choices include a dandelion salad with bacon and apple-sherry dressing, a Croque Madame featuring roast pork loin, gruyere, an egg and oysters.
While the food may be delicious, we are here to learn about wine.
And the harvest is tricky in this undulating country. “It’s not just a party,” Maggie explains. “That’s why we call it a harvest experience. We want people to understand how important this job is for us at this time of year.”
The Grangers employ 12 full-time pickers during harvest season, but rely on this member harvest experience day for a big boost. In exchange for a hearty lunch and a glass of wine or two, members are expected to fan out through the selected vineyard, across several acres to pick for a solid four to five hours. Each vine produces between 25 and 50 bunches of grapes and they all have to come off, adding up to close to 10 tons of fruit in a day.
Members are given a pair of sharp snippers to use and are advised to bring gloves and sturdy footwear, because this is reasonably rough work down the muddy rows of shoulder-height and taller vines, with limestone rocks underfoot that constantly rise to the surface. It would be unwise to wear a white shirt, for there’s plenty of grape juice splatter about, too. There’s lots of heavy lifting and dirty hands — a bit less so for the smaller harvesters, who can reach the low hanging fruit easily.
There are 60 acres under vines at the Grange, out of 220 acres of land. That’s one of the largest operations in the County with 72,000 actual vines. Of these 60 acres, 17 are planted with Pinot Noir, 11 with Riesling, eight with Chardonnay, eight with Pinot Gris and eight with Gamay, four with Cabernet Franc and two with Sauvignon Blanc, as an experiment.
“We made one barrel of Sauvignon Blanc, so that’s 500 litres that we released in July,” Maggie explains. The Grangeproduces about one bottle of wine per vine, for a total of 72,000 annually.
Caroline Granger has a background in wine having lived and worked in Paris. “I discovered I had a palate [for wine],” she says, “every week the maître d’ at a hotel would teach me about ‘world wines.’ They were all from France. But when I came back to Canada, to the farm, I thought, I don’t want to build a winery just to make wine. I want to make wine from this place.”
The production facility at The Grange boasts 26 huge stainless steel tanks for initial fermentation and 155 oak barrels for extended aging. These barrels are pre-loved. They’ve been used by another producer for at least three years, which means that when the wine from the Grange goes into them, it will not absorb a strong oaky flavor. “We work to get the structure of the wine out of the fruit, not out of the barrel,” Caroline explains. “This is neutral oak and so we’re not worried about overwhelming the wine.”
For the Grangers, this life and this land are all about equilibrium. “Having wrestled something from this soil was a huge thrill,” Caroline says. “It’s been hard for me to embrace the idea that I’m always going to have to balance and re-balance what I produce, but it’s important to learn to exist in balance with what you’ve got.”
Grange of Prince Edward Vineyards and Estate Winery
990 Closson Rd, Hillier, Ont.
grangewinery.com | 613.399.1048 | @grangewinery
