During Saturday May 18th and Sunday May 19th— and part of the Terroir On The Move Wine Festival — join us for special small-group structured tastings. Each tasting features five small-batch craft wines, be they past GOLD medal winners or more esoteric, cult wines.

These are outside the normal scope of our winery tastings and delve deep into our most esoteric and premium wines which we rarely pour together at the tasting bar! Each tasting is limited to 12 people, so there is lots of time for questions.

Choose from three themes:

Old Skool/New Skool: Quirky Skin Contacts, Sparklings and Orange Wines

Anything But ABC: Explore vintage and site in 5 exquisite Chardonnays

Grand Cru Too!: The case made in 5 glasses (in red and white) of fantastic vineyard sites at home in Ontario

Cost: $25/pp. $10/pp refunded with stamping of Terroir Passport on day of the tasting. More information here. Reservations required.

Reserve your spot at the tasting of your choice (be sure to scroll down or sort by Tastings).

Allow about 60 minutes.

Winemaker’s Cellar Tasting

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For one day only, we're opening up the cellar in this small-group, exclusive cellar tasting of wines direct from the barrel. Learn about the origins of the wines and about our minimalist small-batch winemaking process across skin-contact and barrel-ferment reds and whites. Taste wines in-progress and compare to their finished siblings with a specific emphasis on texture, acidity and flavour definition.

Saturday Feb. 16, 12pm, 2pm (full) and 3:30pm only. $20/pp RSVP required, 8ppl max. 

Allow at least 45 minutes.

You say you want a revolution?  
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Perhaps it is time you checked out Amber Revolution by Simon J Woolf. It is only the hottest new book about white wines fermented on their skins and Trail Estate Winery is featured within its pages!
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“This book focuses only on wines made with white grapes treated as if they were red, fermented together with their skins (and sometimes stems, too) for a period of multiple days, weeks or months.”
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The technique of using grape skins during fermentation is an age-old technique and in recent years it has become very popular. There are people who think skin contact wine is crazy and that it is a fad or that it gets in the way of terroir, but Taylor Swift said it best, “the haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate.”
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It is without a doubt that this new category, Orange Wine is here to stay.
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“...Orange wine’s time has well and truly come; bottles are proudly displayed on the shelves of countless independent wine merchants, in fashionable wine bars and top-flight restaurants as never before.” (Amber Revolution)
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I like having the flexibility to determine technique based on the grapes that I have, which means the decision to use skin contact will happen when the fruit reaches my crush pad. Having first made skin fermented wines in 2015 I have now narrowed down some of the styles and vineyards that take to the technique. I make an orange wine, left on the skins for months and bottled without fining, filtration or sulphur and it is very popular, is pretty funky and has that orange/amber colour that is desired.

I also craft what I consider to be skin-fermented whites (instead of Orange) and this is what we are going to explore this month! They are a combination of old and new winemaking. I use natural yeast to ferment while on skins, no temperature control and I gently immerse the skins with the fermenting juice daily. Once I separate the skins I craft them like conventional wines to retain the fresh and fruity aromatics. The resulting wines are poised, full of flavour and structure and an accurate reflection of vintage differences.
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All three of the wines included this month are from the same vineyard, picked the same day, processed and fermented together. Natural fermentation in stainless steel tanks, pressed after 13 days on the skins. Sulphured to inhibit malolactic fermentation and to retain vibrancy in the wine. One wine is bottled right away while the other two go back into two barrels for eleven months, leading to divergent, yet fascinating results.
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2017 Hughes Skin Contact Riesling 
2017 Hughes Skin Contact, Barrel-Aged Riesling — “Earth”
2017 Hughes Skin Contact, Barrel-Aged Riesling — “Heaven”