“There’s no better way to understand a wine than to visit where it’s made,” says Gina Haverstock, winemaker for Gaspereau Vineyards in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. We were standing on a hilltop, looking down over a half–mile of vines, their grapes showing bright and plump through the bushy leaves.
It’s a trait of good wine that it is more than something to drink. Like a trick mirror, a quality wine is an aggregation of many things, imparting not only its own flavour, but that of the landscape from which it comes: the soil, the air and perhaps even the ethos of a place. In a glass of Torrontés, you’ll taste the cold wind of Argentina's Calchaquí Valley, and in a muscadet, the sunshine of France’s Loire Valley. Canada’s East Coast has its own version of this in Tidal Bay, a deliciously subtle aromatic white, in which there is the salt–touched sweetness of a Nova Scotian shoreline.