From Toronto I backtracked a short distance south around the
west side of Lake Ontario at a city named Hamilton . I read somewhere that
Hamilton is an industrial city and Canada’s main steel producing city, but I
didn’t see much evidence of big industrial facilities and smokestacks from the
highway.

The landmass that stretches about 30 miles east from
Hamilton to the Niagara River and the border with New York State is called the
Niagara Peninsula. The peninsula’s notable topographical feature is the Niagara
Escarpment, a ridge several hundred feet high that continues east into New York
as well as northwestward from Hamilton. Lake Erie and the land around it is
almost 300 feet higher than Lake Ontario, and it is this escarpment that the
Saint Lawrence River System drops over at Niagara Falls and has carved a
significant gorge below the present location of the falls.

The geography creates climate conditions that are very
favorable to orchards and vineyards, and the Niagara Peninsula is one of Canada’s
two main wine-producing regions, the other being the Okanagan Valley and surrounding
valleys in British Columbia . The escarpment creates well-drained hillsides that
are not as susceptible to late and early frosts, and Lake Ontario’s size and
depth help moderate temperatures. Most of the vineyards are near the towns of
Grimsby, Lincoln, and Saint Catherine’s with some also closer to
Niagara-on-the-Lake, an attractive resort town at the mouth of the Niagara
River at Lake Ontario.

I stopped and sampled at about half a dozen wineries and
went on a tour at one of them. What the Niagara Peninsula is best known for is
Ice Wine, something I wasn’t very familiar with. The wine is of German origin
and is created from grapes that have been left on the vine long after normal
harvest. Once there has been a deep-enough and long-enough freeze the frozen
grapes are harvested and crushed and the ice crystals removed, resulting in a
more concentrated level of sugar in the remaining juice, one which ends up very
sweet once yeast is introduced to make the juice ferment.

Ice wine is very expensive, and the primary market for it
now is East Asian countries where it is considered a luxury item and consumption
as status symbol . Needless to say, they weren’t very generous with their pours
of the stuff at the wineries, but it does taste really good. Konzelmann Winery
and Inniskillin Winery in Niagara-on-the-Lake are two of the biggest producers
of Ice Wine, and Canada produces most of the world’s output of it.

Although I think Ontario wines are perfectly good, they don’t
necessarily stand out to me as being better than wines from upstate New York.
They also tend to be more expensive than American wines. Alcohol is taxed more
heavily and more consistently by volume across beer, wine, and spirits than in
the U.S., so there’s no very cheap booze there the way there’s cheap beer and
box or jug wine in the U.S. The cheapest bottles of wine from America will be
around $7 in Canada rather than the Three-Buck Chuck you can get in many parts
of the U.S.