wine and chocolate

wine and chocolate yes, two of my favourite things.. this is basically what my saturday consisted of. although my birthday is tomorrow (monday), terry and i thought it would be a better idea to celebrate my birthday on the saturday. i was asked a couple of times what i wanted for my birthday and honestly all i wanted was a nice dinner or a nice day together to do something fun, something like wine tasting. lucky for us, living in hamilton, we are less than an hour away from niagara-on-the-lake, one of the largest wine producing regions in Canada. 
terry went ahead and booked a wine tour for the two of us. the tour started around 1:45, check in to be around 1:30. we got to our first winery around 2:00 and there we got to try some white wine and two different icewines - riesling and a cabernet sauvignon. icewine, if you have never tried it, is more of a dessert wine. its extremely sweet, sometimes to the point where it is recommended to drink it with some dark (bitter) chocolate. i loved it though! it literally smelt like jam. the wine expert had a little something to say about each of the wines we tried. 

after the organized wine tasting we spend about 20 minutes walking around looking at the selections of wine and trying a few different ones we didn't trying during the tasting. then off we were to the next winery. 
the next winery was niagara college. this is actually one of the only two colleges in north america that offers a school for wine making. here we got to walk out to the vineyards and go down to the cellar to see the machines they used and where the wine is stored. we also got to see the teaching classroom in where the students learn how and eventually make their own wine.

barrels and barrels of wine.

we learned some information along the way - such as: red wines are typically stored in oak barrels and wine wines are typically held in steel. the longer the reds are stored in the barrels the stronger tasting they often are and it is completely up to the wine maker how long they want to store the wines. also, the reason wines have different names is because they are actually named after the grapes that are used to make the wine (there are 100's different types of grapes).. icewine is actually made with frozen grapes that have to be picked when the temperature is between -8 and -12 degrees celsius.

next we went to a family owned winery called caroline cellars.. the wines here are not sold in the lcbo (if you are from ontario you are familiar with the lcbo, if you are not, the lcbo is our liquor store.. as we cannot buy liquor from any grocery store or convenience store here in canada.)

lastly we went to reif estates winery where we tried a riesling, a cabarnet merlot and an icewine and we also learned a little about the history of the wineries in the niagara region. 

it was a perfect way to celebrate my birthday and a fun thing to do in general. i could never imagine going every weekend or anything (you do try between 3 and 6 wines at each of the wineries- this does add up!) but id love to go again sometime. adding to make it a great day, the weather stayed clear from rain!