Tag: niagara

Niagara in summary

Espresso ice cream and chocolate moelleux.

Though we’ll probably be taking a break from this “tradition”, this year we again spent a few days in the Niagara-on-the-Lake area. I wrote up the full blurb here: Return to Niagara. This post is just a summary of the more notable items.

Best discoveries

Caroline Cellars and Farmhouse Cafe: Menu items almost all under $20. Glasses of wine $7 or less. Bottles of wine (to take home) under $20. And it was all very good! Not blow-off-your-socks good, but both food and wine were very enjoyable. Staff were friendly. A nice visit. A nice change.

Niagara Custom Crush Studio: It features the wines of multiple small wineries all under one roof, a cool idea that is well executed. On this visit, we tried wines from two wineries with very different approaches to wine making, which was super interesting.

NOTL: Treadwell’s sister restaurant, with a simpler menu and lower prices, but still excellent quality. And a bonus beautiful sunny dining room.

Weather report

Mixed bag for sure. We had one warm but cloud day; one cool but sunny day; one day with torrential rain / freezing rain / thunder / snow / wind; and yet another cool but sunny day. In between the inclement weather events, we did some walking and hiking.

Winery round-up

Best guide: Strewn, where our private, sit-down tasting was led by someone with a lot of experience and knowledge. Most fun: Fielding Estates, because we’re suckers for the snow globe experience (now done for the year). Best refuge: Reif Estates, from whence we watched the crazy storm while tasting wine and eating charcuterie. Most chaotic: Malivoire, who were supposed to be closed due to storm damage, but finally gave up and gave tastings.

The other dinners

Jean was underwhelmed by the offerings of Trius Winery, despite their Michelin star. Nothing bad—but maybe not star worthy? Beautiful plating, though.

Chicken pate with ornate topper.
Adorned chicken pate.

Treadwell’s was up to its usual high standards of food quality and wine pairings, but compared only to itself in the past, it was disappointing in terms of the experience. It was just your usual three-course meal with good service. We didn’t get our past feeling of it representing a really special night out.

Espresso ice cream and chocolate moelleux
Espresso ice cream and chocolat moelleux.

Won’t whine about the amount of wine: Niagara 2024

We don’t pledge to continue this annually forevermore, but there’s no denying that this is the third year in a row we head to the Niagara area around now. In a lot of ways, it’s a good time to visit: it’s low season, so somewhat cheaper, and quite a bit less crowded—often resulting in better service. Weather of course can be iffy but that means, sometimes, it’s not bad!

Same destination, but that doesn’t mean it was all the same activities. These were the new:

  • Visiting Reif Estate Winery
  • Staying at Shaw Club, Niagara-on-the-Lake
  • Reserving Wine Dome Lounge at Fielding Estate Winery
  • Staying and dining at Inn on the Twenty, Jordan

And these were repeats, though not necessarily “same old”:

  • Dining at Peller Estates Winery
  • Wine tasting at Strewn Winery
  • Hiking the Niagara Glen trail
  • Dining at Treadwells
  • Hiking the Twenty Valley trail, Jordan

Despite knowing I was heading into wine country, I would not have predicted trying a $100 bottle of wine, nor a sherry nearly as old as I am. And yet!

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Staying home but eating out

At the start of summer, I made a list of restaurants I hoped to get out to, this time of year when it’s less fraught to do so, because patios. We knocked off a few in the earlier weeks of summer, notably:

  • Loloan Lobby Bar (more on it later)
  • Babylon Wine Sisters Wine Bar, that we went to not long after Jean’s accident, enjoying their charcuterie board and always interesting wine flights in the alleyway patio.
  • The Olive Board, which we fairly spontaneously biked to one day when the “bad air warning” from the forest fires cleared out earlier than expected, leaving behind a lovely day. We quite enjoyed the Bon Appétit charcuterie board and the wine flights on their sidewalk patio.

But we recently had quite a sequence of dining out, thanks to some cooperative weather and a few days off.

First up was S&V Uptown. We were originally supposed to go there with friends, but they got unexpected visitors. (Well, the visitors were expected, just not on this earlier arrival date.) I changed our reservation to be for two people only, and moved it to a Wednesday night. That date initially had a pretty rainy forecast, but that improved, so we were able to ride our bikes there, and eat on the patio.

Said patio is located in an alleyway, but it’s still kind of a nice setup (considering this is uptown Waterloo). The only issue at S&V’s exact spot—because a number of restaurants use this alley for their patios—is the constant drone of one window air conditioner in particular, that maybe needs maintenance or something.

Flowers in foreground, me in background, S&V patio
A pretty but somewhat noisy patio
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Five five-star restaurants in five days

We dined in domes, tents, and old Victorian houses. We had five dinners but we only left two tips (and we don’t suck). In between, we walked, we wined, we saw some art.

Blog title courtesy of Jean, who was determined to have some time off after not getting any at Christmas time (beyond the statutory days). We didn’t venture too far from home—Beamsville, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Toronto, Kleinburg, which are all within a two hours’ drive. And it wasn’t, per se, designed as a culinary tour. But it did turn out that way!

Because, you see, I’m still making some efforts to avoid catching Covid. And when it came to selecting restaurants, well, it wasn’t your Mom and Pop fish’n’chips places that offered space. And clean air. Those only came packaged as “dining experiences”. Covid safe(r), it turns out, is kind of delicious.

Sunday

We left home mid-morning, headed to an appointment at Commisso Estate Winery in Beamsville. Their website promised wine tastings in a “fun, safe, private” environment. I didn’t necessarily trust the promise—so many places just didn’t bother to remove their Covid protocols page once they stopped following it—but I figured a smaller winery in February wouldn’t be that crowded. I optimistically (and pragmatically, given that dinner wasn’t til 7) also ordered a charcuterie board.

It worked out. We ended up being their only customers at this time. Not only that, but their tastings are conducted in a tent that was plenty warm, thanks to gas heaters. After we were seated, we got the history of the place, and overview of the wines.

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Getting out(side) while the getting is good

While it’s a hot, sticky day today again, there are hints of autumn on the way in the cooler nights, the changing leaf colours here and there, the shorter days. And while some outdoor activities hold an appeal in winter, not quite as many, and not for as long.

So we tried to rack up a few more outdoor events in the later part of August. And by “events”, I mostly mean eating and drinking outdoors. But with some travel and pretty locations involved.

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Wining and dining while trying to avoid cooties

I promise this won’t turn into a big politic rant, but it’s just a fact that the Ontario government no longer cares if I (or anyone in Ontario) gets Covid—as long as not too many of us end up in hospital with it. (And even there, they keep mumbling about how they have some spare hospitals beds now.)

Stubbornly, I’d still rather avoid it, if I can. Even for the triple-vaccinated, it seems unpleasant to have. And then there’s those possible long-term effects: Long Covid. Early dementia. Diabetes. Higher risk of heart attacks and stroke.

Happily for privileged me (and here I could do a rant about how the government has abandoned the less-privileged and the more-vulnerable, but I won’t), I do have considerable ability to, well, just stay home and avoid people. And the temperament to not mind it all that much.

But it is nice to leave the house once in a while. And I do have vacation days to take. We’d really enjoyed our time in Niagara-on-the-Lake in November, so earlier in the year, we planned to spend a few nights there in late March.

Then the government dismantled everything that had made that fall trip feel comfortable: Capacity limits—lifted. Vaccine passports—gone. Mask mandates—history. Meanwhile, the Omicron BA.2 variant, the most contagious one yet, makes its inexorable rise.

And thanks be we weren’t headed to Ottawa, which has already reached historic levels of Covid infections

Still, most of our planned activities seemed relatively low risk. The outdoor hiking is obviously not a problem. Wineries offered private tastings. We could mask in the common areas of the Inn we were staying. But what about dinner???

Spring has not really sprung in these parts yet, so patios weren’t an option. And sure, you can do takeout. But we didn’t want to. Niagara-on-the-Lake has some terrific restaurants. And we love the whole multi-course, wine-matched, lingering indoor dining experience. But Covid-wise, there’s so little you can control when in a restaurant: you can’t mask, you can’t know in advance how well-ventilated the restaurant is, you can’t prevent other people from being seated near you.

And then I got an idea…

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Yet another Ontario vacation

I had more vacation days left than I needed for Christmas time, and there seemed little point in carrying them forward into the first three months of next year. So we took the first week of November off, and visited Niagara-on-the-Lake and the north shore of Lake Erie.

Beautiful tree on a sunny day in Niagara
This is November?

Fortunately the weather proved cooperative. We had a warm late October in southern Ontario, and while it got cooler this first week of November, it was very sunny—and that warm October meant that a lot of trees still had their colourful leaves. So not a “dreary” November week at all.

In Niagara-on-the-Lake, we stayed at Harbour House, which is a pretty nice spot. It was not a huge room, but the space was very well organized, and it came with little perks like a bathrobe and a wine-and-cheese hour. I was a bit surprised that we had to show proof of vaccination upon checking in, but that was for the included indoor breakfast, which was quite good—granola, fruit, and yogourt, followed by a hot item such as quiche.

It was also on the lake, which meant some great walks were right there.

Continue reading “Yet another Ontario vacation” →

Day in Beamsville

We took last Monday off and spent it visiting the Beamsville area. We started at a winery called Good Earth Food and Wine Co., which earned the honour by being the only place we could find there that was open for lunch on Mondays. It still proved an excellent choice, though. Their patio overlooks their lovely grounds, and their bistro menu is small-ish but clearly focused on their strengths. We quite enjoyed the whipped chicken liver parfait appetizer we shared, and my main course wood-oven pizza du jour, featuring bechamel, wild mushrooms, and truffle oil, was also lovely. (I don’t recall what Jean’s main was, but he was happy with it.)

I enjoyed my lunch with a glass of their orange Pinot Grigio, while Jean had the sparkling rose (80% Pinot Noir, 20% Chardonnay). We liked both of those enough to buy a bottle of each (Pinot was $18, the sparkling $29), then went for an (also outdoor) wine tasting. With that effort, we came away with a bottle each of the oaked 2017 Chardonnay ($27), and the off-dry Betty’s Blend white (not listed on their website, so I guess you can only buy it in person). We decided against the Viognier.

Good Earth Food and Wine company
Photo from https://winesinniagara.com/2019/07/good-vibrations-at-the-good-earth-food-and-wine-co/

Our next stop was at The Organized Crime Winery—selected partly because I liked the name! (I should note that, based our current wine stocks, we’d decided in advance to only try whites and roses, and the outdoor tastings in the heat of the day only strengthened that resolve. So apologies to red wine fans, I guess.) At Organized Crime, we picked out three 2020 wines to try: the Pinot Gris, an orange wine blend called Sacrilege, and a Sauvignon Blanc. Though we didn’t know it when making the selections, apparently 2020 was an excellent year for Beamsville Bench wines, so keep that in mind.

And we indeed found all three wines complex and interesting, but the Pinot Gris—which interestingly was more orange in color than the orange wine—was far and away our favourite. In purchasing a couple bottles, we found it’s a common opinion, and they sell out of Pinot Gris quickly every year. It’s $21 a bottle.

Next up: We’d made a reservation for tasting at Kew Vineyard Estate Winery, another “new to use” winery. They seated us at a lovely, treed outdoor setting and provided a little menu of wines, albeit with no tasting notes. But our server was quite willing and able to provide them for any we were interested in, and we also used our phone to look things up on the website.

Kew Winery outdoor tasting area
Speaking of their website, this is where I got this image, showing part of the tasting area.

We knew this would be our last wine stop of the day, so we did two rounds of three tastings. As a result, I don’t recall everything we tried! But I do know what we liked enough to buy:

  • 2015 Old Vines Riesling, a real classic, delicious, dry-style Niagara Riesling, $16 a bottle (we got two)
  • 2018 Rosalie, a rose of 100% Pinot Noir, a lovely drink for $30
  • 2015 Fumé Blanc, which is an oaked Sauvignon Blanc—it does have a real smokey taste. Quite an interesting wine to learn about! The name was coined in California back in the day when the Sauvignon Blanc grape wasn’t much of a draw. One tip: No controls over the term Fumé Blanc, so hard to be sure just what kind of wine you’re getting. $20
  • North Cider Brut—a dry apple-based sparkling, which they call “Normandy style”, which I think would be just fine with food (like chicken). $13.

Despite it being somewhat warm and sticky, we finished off the day with a little hike at Ball’s Falls. It was good to get some walking in, though the falls themselves weren’t at their most impressive.

Ball's Falls
Though the Falls do look pretty nice in this Jean photo!

Niagara-on-the-Lake in March

With joint March birthdays as an excuse, we got away for a long weekend, visiting Toronto and Niagara-on-the-Lake. In Toronto, one of us got to the Tim Burton Exhibit at the TIFF Bell Lighthouse, while another visited MEC. There was definitely a strong Johnny Depp presence at the Burton exhibit (like Depp’s outfit from Edward Scissorhands), but most impressive, really, were Burton’s own paintings and sketches.

Mostly, though, we were there to visit with the sisters and their families, which was nice. We were well fed and had some interesting discussions on topics such as technology, politics, pet ownership, and Canadian wines.

In Niagara-on-the-Lake, we stayed at Harbour House Inn for the first time. We were really impressed with that. We had selected one of their more modest offerings, but it was still quite a large room with fireplace. This was the bathroom:

Bathroom at Harbour house, with tub, separate shower, and fancy sink

The rooms also had an iPod dock, big-screen TV, DVD players, and fresh-made cookies. The Inn offered a very good European-style breakfast; DVD rentals (current movies; DVD player and big-screen TV in the room); a daily wine tasting; and shuttle service to and from restaurants for dinner—all included in the price. Which, because it was low season and we had booked on Expedia, really wasn’t that extravagant. (Apparently, quite a different story in the summer.)

And of course, while there, we visited a number of wineries. Our big discovery, I would say, was Caroline Cellars, which our Harbour House shuttle driver recommended. We had certainly found some nice wines at other wineries, but they were quite often over $20 a bottle. At Caroline’s, we honestly liked everything we tasted, and all were under $20. Some well under. We were particularly impressed with the 2007 Cabernet Franc ($15.50) and the Bradley White (Sauvignon Blanc), at just $11, but we also got the Enchantment (Riesling / Gerwurtz) and 2007 Cab Sauv. None available at LCBO.

In terms of location, Megalomanic (nearer to Beamsville) was the most fun, as it’s up on a hill, and you get a great view. (Maybe I’ll add photographic proof later). We tried three wines there, including a Riesling so cold you couldn’t tell how it tasted (not so useful, that), and bought the Bigmouth Merlot ($25), a fairly bold red.

Other visits (over two days):

  • Tawse Winery, known for good but not cheap wines. We got a Riesling and a 2008 Pinot noir there—at $54, the most we spent on one bottle.
  • Creekside Estates, a source for a 2009 Sauvignon Blanc and 2007 Shiraz.
  • Coyote’s Run, which offers the interesting experience of tasting the same wine grown in two different soils. They’re noticeably different. We bought a Red Paw Chardonnay here ($22) that we’ve been enjoying this week. Full but not overly oaky.

We also tried mostly new (to us) restaurants this time. Stone Road Grille may have impressed us most. Jean had foie gras poutine (!) followed by duck confit. I had the Chef’s salad (which included duck confit, Niagara Gold cheese, and quail’s egg) and a pasta stuffed with sweet potato entree, which was just amazing. Each item on the menu had a recommended wine (from an all-Canadian list), and each entree was offered in a smaller portion, which was great. Then there was the dessert of chocolate mousse with salted caramel ice cream, chocolate chile sauce, and spiced almonds. Yum. (And not too big a portion, either.)

Our fanciest meal was probably at Hillebrand Winery, where we had a three-course lunch. Can’t complain about the food quality there, either, and they did a very good job of matching the food to the wine. That was a big midday meal, though, so supper that night was at the Old Winery restaurant, which offers more pizza and pasta. All well-prepared, though, with good-quality ingredients.

So the only disappointing meal was at Inn on the Twenty, where we had lunch on the way in. It was mostly good—I was quite happy with my bison and mushroom main—but Jean’s mussels just weren’t fresh enough. Several weren’t open and those that were tasted kind of fishy. A restaurant of a certain caliber shouldn’t serve sub-par mussels.

And between all that eating and drinking, we did a little shopping, some walking, a lot of relaxing. Weather was quite cooperative for March, either sunny but cool or cloudy but warmer. After this week, there’s no complaining about that!

The Bauer Kitchen and Angel’s Gate Winery restaurant

This weekend we had visitors, so we ate out a couple of times.

The Bauer Kitchen is a relatively new restaurant, the latest in a series by The Charcoal Group. I’ve always found Charcoal restaurants to be solid but unexciting, but was curious to try Bauer mainly because every item on the menu is paired with a particular wine by the glass.

Being lodged in a renovated factory, the place itself has a fair amount of character, which is nice. The high ceilings and Saturday night popularity made it somewhat loud, though. The service was perfectly respectable. Pretty informal (“Hi guys!”), but attentive, and no big waits for orders, food delivery, or bill pick-up.

As a starter, I had the mixed mushrooms tart with St. André and Romano cheese. I had some fear would be too cheesy, but that was not the case; the mushroom taste predominated, and was very good. That was paired with a Chilean pinot. Others at our table had cold melon soup with prosciutto, part of the Summerlicious menu, and declared it merely OK, and baked brie with sugared pecans and fruit. It’s hard to go wrong with baked brie.

For the main course, I went for the Cioppino. This version was a pile of tomato-y onions and sweet peppers, topped with several kinds of fish and seafood. I was pleasantly surprised how well the fish was done, with nothing overcooked. The vegetables had a definite sweet tinge, which was not unappealing. Also tried was the duck, found to be good but not great (nice sauce, but possibly overcooked); baked trout that was apparently also prepared very well; and prosciutto-wrapped pork tenderloin with mashed potatoes, both a hit. My dish came with an Australian white of a type of grape I’d never heard of before, and now can’t remember. But it was fine, maybe a bit Chardonnay-like, and did suit the food.

Dessert for me was a mix of sorbet and fruit in an ice wine sauce. I couldn’t really detect the ice wine, but the sorbet was very nice. I had that with one of their specialty coffees (instead of the recommended ice wine), made with steamed milk rather than whipped cream. The other two desserts were declared perfectly appealing as well.

Overall, of course, it was not Verses or Langdon Hall quality, but then again, it’s cheaper as well. I would declare the Bauer Kitchen good value for the money.

Sunday we headed out to Beamsville to visit a few wineries. After a stop at Rosewood, where I got a Gewurtz and a Riesling, we went for lunch at Angel’s Gate Winery. The menu is quite different: It offers four platters, all intended to serve two people, on these themes: Regional, Quebec, East Coast, and cheese. We went for Regional and cheese. Then, most of us also opted for flights of wine, which is 2 ounces of four of their wines.

The Regional platter was really nice, with lamb loin, absolutely delicious tomatoes, green beans done up nicely in a truffle sauce, pickerel fillet, and crepes with berries and goats cheese. The cheese assortment included Cheddar, a Hermitage blue, a brie, and another, with a good selection of fruit and crackers.

The setting there is gorgeous: an open terrace looking out over the vineyard. And Sunday was beautiful; a perfect day for that type of lunch. Having four types of wine and so many types of food was great fun, and really, the perfect way to taste wine. Though in the end, I only bought their Tavel-style rosé (just $11.95!).

Après lunch, we headed to Crown Bench Estates, known for their flavored ice wines. Jean’s sister picked up a few of those, but we stuck to the 2007 reds, bringing home the Meritage, which is a blend.

Somewhat rounding out the culinary weekend (which, Saturday, also featured a stop at the Olive Grove in Elora, for olive oil and vinegar tasting), we made a foie gras and duck breast supper, all based on LCBO recipes. The duck was accompanied by beets, oyster mushrooms, and mint, in olive oil and balsamic, and it turned out really well. (Yes, better than at Bauer Kitchen.) The side of Jamie Oliver roasted potatoes, with very fresh rosemary and sage, were also a hit.

Now, to exercise.