Niagara on the Lake Wine Tour Bus

Ontario's first winery licence since Prohibition was issued in 1975, to a farm on the Niagara Parkway minutes from Queen Street. The town beside it is older than the industry by nearly two centuries. Founded as Newark, it served as the capital of Upper Canada from 1792 to 1796. American forces burned it in December 1813. What stands today is largely the work of the 1810s and 1820s: low Georgian and Regency frontages, brick and clapboard, set on a grid the fire could not erase. The current name came later, adopted to separate the town from Niagara Falls upriver. Fort George still holds the ground above the river mouth. Niagara On The Lake Wine Tour Bus tours move through that grid daily. The vineyards came late and rose fast. Vintners Quality Alliance standards arrived in 1988. Three years later a Vidal icewine from the peninsula took the Grand Prix d'Honneur at Vinexpo in Bordeaux, and export demand followed. In 2005 the region was divided into sub-appellations — Four Mile Creek, St. David's Bench, Niagara Lakeshore, Niagara River — each defined by soil and distance from water. Lake Ontario tempers the winters. The escarpment blocks the cold behind it. Riesling, Chardonnay, Cabernet Franc and Gamay ripen on old lakebed clay. Peaches and cherries came first; tender fruit gave the soil its reputation long before the vines. Estate cellars now number in the dozens within a ten-kilometre radius, most of them working farms with tasting rooms attached. Some occupy converted barns. Others were built for the purpose, barrel halls sunk below grade to hold an even temperature. The Shaw Festival, running since 1962, pulls a second audience into the same four blocks, and a Niagara-on-the-Lake winery shuttle threads both crowds. The route out passes orchards, a golf course laid in 1875, and hedgerows planted as windbreaks. Niagara On The Lake Wine Tour Bus tickets carry passengers past facades the 1813 fires spared and vines that did not exist within living memory.